
Outlines of 
modern 



Sclei 

mi 

moment 

glriifiaiitf 




6m. & ttcomy Pita 




Class JS-L&J 

Book fP^'ST 

GqpgM'N? 



COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT 




THE GRAVE THAT "NEVER SHALL BE OPENED.' 
{See page 46.} 



OUTLINES 



OF 



MODERN CHRISTIANITY 
and MODERN SCIENCE 



BY 



Geo. E. McCready Price 



"Are God and Nature then at strife, 
That Nature lends such evil dreams?" 

— In Memoriam LV, 



'We talk and think upon the surface. Few of us examine the major 
premises of half our conclusions." 



-Froude, "Short Studies," p. 325 



PACIFIC PRESS PUBLISHING COMPANY 

OAKLAND, CAL. San Francisco Kansas City New York 



J- IK*: 



z+o 



~BZ- 



- 



Entered, According to Act of Congress, in the Year 1902, by 

Pacific Press Publishing Company 
In the Office of the Librarian of Congress, Washington , D. C. 



Aei, Rights Reserved 




00 

/ i 
- ** 



PUBLISHERS' PREFACE 



One of the mightiest problems which faces the 
human race, — nay, the mightiest, — is the salvation, the 
regeneration, of the human. He finds himself, when 
he awakes to consciousness, in a world of sin, of ab- 
normalities, of inconsistencies, of depravity, of death. 
The highest types of nobility and princely worth, the 
lowest types of depravity and moral unworth, the 
wretchedest inconsistencies, the most intricate puzzle of 
all, is found in man himself. 

Whence is he ? Why is he ? What is the ultimate 
of it all ? What changes may we look for ? Is char- 
acter the result of the will, the result of environments, 
or does it involve relationship with divine power? 
Does death end existence ? These are questions which 
have insistently demanded answers through all the cen- 
turies. That the great pagan religions have not an- 
swered these questions satisfactorily is evidenced by the 
conditions and oftentimes destruction of the peoples 
who were their most zealous devotees. 

Among the pagan religions of earth the Christianity 
of two millenniums ago nearly glowed like a sun 
among dead worlds. 

"The people which sat in darkness 
Saw a great light; 

And to them which sat in the region and shadow of death, 
To them did light spring up." 

To man in the utter despair of weakness the gospel 
came "the power of God unto salvation to every one 

(iii) 



iv Publishers' Preface. 

that believeth." It taught man so to come into har- 
mony with God that he could receive the inflow of 
God's life. It showed God's power to save by the great 
facts of His creation, and demonstrated that power in 
the healing, the regeneration of men. It created men 
anew in Christ Jesus. It lifted man from the inherent 
selfishness of the flesh to a life of unselfish devotion 
to others. It swept idolatry, with all its debasing 
influences, from the heart and made man a worshiper 
of the one God of love, with every faculty open toward 
the Infinite. And, notwithstanding its corruptions 
by "science falsely so called/' by pagan superstitions, 
by heathen traditions which make of God an unspeak- 
able tyrant, by abnormal and monstrous union with the 
state, Christianity has brightened the face of the world 
and given hope to those who were sitting in despair 
in the shadow of death. 

As long as the spouse of Jesus Christ clung to her 
sovereign Lord and His only remedy — regeneration 
by the creative power of His life as set forth in His 
Word — there was hope. But in these later days a 
subtler form of evil — nay, every subtle form of evil — 
has crept into the church itself; it finds utterance in her 
theological seminaries ; it is given to the world through 
her publications ; it is taught from pulpits dedicated to 
the promulgation of the gospel of the power of God. 
It tells us that God is not a personal Father; that the 
story of His creative power and providential dealings 
with His earthly children is mythical allegory; that 
man did not come direct from the Creator's touch, 
made in the image of God, but evoluted through un- 
told millenniums from the lower orders of life; that the 



Publishers' Preface. v 

days of creation were not literal, but long aeons of 
time; that man did not fall, but evolved, ever upward 
on the whole from the protozoa to the ape, from the 
ape to the civilized man; and that the only hope of 
the race is in continued evolution. Hence man needs 
no sacrifice, no Saviour; that Jesus the Christ if He 
lived and died at all, lived and died in vain ; that there 
is no resurrection of the dead, no personal return of 
the Lord. 

And in the light of all this the children of the church 
are turning from the Word as the chaff and accept- 
ing the deductions and inductions of the hypothesis 
and reasonings of science as the wheat. And souls 
despair and die, and go out into the great unknown 
darkness with naught to lean upon save the uncertain, 
contradictory theories of a sick, halting theology. 

It is to meet this backward, downward drift that the 
author has written this little work. It is believed that 
there are thousands in the ranks of scientists who, if 
they did but pause and think, would be glad to know, 
even as their hearts demand, a better way. It is be- 
lieved that thousands of religious teachers who are 
now giving the Bible such uncertain homage have been 
dazed and confounded by the strong assertions of in- 
fidel scientists, but that if they only understood the 
true bearings of the questions at issue, they would be 
glad to welcome to their heart the Old Book, and preach 
anew its soul-stirring, life-giving, character-regenerat- 
ing doctrines. We believe that this book will help 
every earnest, seeking soul back to "the old paths 
where is the good way." Such is its mission, and 
such is the prayer of The Publishers. 



TABLE OF CONTENTS 

CHAPTER I. 

THE TERMS DEFINED.— The origin of things— What ? 
science can not do — Cause and effect — The irresistible 
logic — The problem of the atom — Law a proof of a Cre- 
ator — Theoristic evolution — Religion and civilization — 
Scientific dogmatism — Change in Protestantism — Back to 
the old paths — Conflicts of the past — Modern science — 
Importance of nature study — The nature of man — 
Romeward tendency , 13-37 

CHAPTER II. 

DIVINE IMMANENCE.— What the Bible says— The Testi- 
mony of the Sabbath institution — Two basic ideas of 
evolution — One universal, omnipresent energy — An intel- 
ligent Designer — How does He act — Relationship of God 
to nature — Free will — Creator's law unchangeable — 
Seeming contradictions — Unsolved problems of the ether 
— Limited knowledge of scientists — Questions of repro- 
duction 38-67 

CHAPTER III. 

SCIENTIFIC WORLD BUILDING.— Scientific aspects of 
evolution— What gave action to matter — A hot or cold 
begini/ing— Nebular theory defined — Motions of satellites 
— Some problems to solve 68-90 

CHAPTER IV. 

MOLTEN THOUGH RIGID.— More modern theories- 
Causes of earthquakes 91-121 

(vii) 



viii Table of Co?itents. 

CHAPTER V. 

GEOLOGICAL GUESSING. — Scheme of evolutionary 
geology — Question of the universal flood — Uncertainty 
of geological conclusions— Reasoning in a circle 123-153 

CHAPTER VI. 

BIBLICAL GEOLOGY.— The earth in the beginning- 
Changes wrought by the flood — " Mammoth" remains — 
Deposits of coal— Witnesses of the fossils 154-198 

CHAPTER VII. 

DESPAIRING DARWINISM.— " Survival of the fittest"— 
Adaptation of ends to means — Preliminary "conviction" 
— Only hope of a future life — Primitive man 199-233 

CHAPTER VIII. 

SOME MORAL ASPECTS OF THE EVOLUTION THE- 
ORY. — Bible and science — The accuracy of the Bible — 
How did man begin — Character of the first great cause 
— Testimony of Christ 234-252 

CHAPTER IX. 

EVOLUTION AND THE WORLD PROBLEMS.— Civil- 
ization not necessarily moral — Increase of knowledge — 
Present world conditions — The one remedy 253-271 



INTRODUCTION 

That there is room for a book which takes the real 
Biblical side of the pending Science-versus-Religion 
controversies must be very evident. If I were to say 
that since Darwinism arose such a book has not been 
written before, my readers would doubtless smile at 
my assurance, and with the monumental works of Dr. 
McCosh, Dawson, and others in their minds and 
hearts, would lay this little work down without 
further examination. But with the scores of books 
now being issued on "Theistic Evolution," I have 
thought that side of the matter pretty well repre- 
sented, and that a little contrast might be acceptable 
to intelligent, thinking men and women. 

The present work is an endeavor to get back to 
primitive Christian principles. My idea is that if 
there is any truth whatever in Christianity, we shall 
not help matters at all by trying to "reconstruct" the 
whole system of Christian theology, as the Theistic 
Evolutionists are now with one voice advising us to 
do. That is, if Christianity is anything more than a 
beautiful myth, we can not hope to improve either its 
spirit or its fundamental doctrines as revealed in our 
only Text-book of its principles. Hence, it has oc- 
curred to the writer that before this unconditional 
surrender, it might be well first to make one more 
honest effort to get back to real primitive Christian 
principles without any compromise whatever, and try 

(ix) 



2C Introduction. 

whether the known facts of science, as distinguished 
from its theories, would not be better explained from 
the Mosaic account of the Creation and the Deluge, 
if these be understood according to their literal and 
obvious intent. Consistency is sometimes a guide 
to apparently elusive truth. 

For some time it has been noticed by the "man 
in the street'' that the nineteenth century monu- 
ment of Uniformitarian Geology erected by Lyell and 
Agassiz (and I write their names with respect), and 
built about with such indefatigable zeal by their de- 
voted followers, was growing rather top-heavy with 
absurdity. If the great army of workmen now busy 
in finishing it have not observed this, it does not im- 
ply any defect of mental vision on their part, but only 
that they are too near the base and too devoted to 
their work to discern this disaster impending above 
them. I should be extremely sorry to see it tumble 
upon their heads; and my fourth, fifth, and sixth 
chapters are to be taken as only so many kindly 
shouts of, "Out from under!'' before the inevitable 
crash takes place. If I have spoken rather vigor- 
ously therein, it has not been through malice or from 
disrespect for a single one of the hundreds who are 
laboring on this work in single-minded devotion to 
truth. But unless Christianity is a fable rapidly be- 
ing forgotten, this whole fabric of modern geology 
is the thing that will have to be "reconstructed" on 
an entirely new foundation. 

The author makes no claim to scientific attain- 
ments. The logical necessity for such a work, and 
the long neglect of others better qualified to under- 



Introduction. xi 

take such a task, are the only excuses he would offer 
for giving these pioneer ideas to the public in their 
present comparatively crude condition. But he has 
not consciously blinked a single difficulty, though the 
extremely limited number of good scientific works 
within his reach has rendered some parts of this first 
effort of the kind ever published (as he believes) far 
less complete than he desired. 

To those who find in these pages anything that 
throws new light on old questions, and who them- 
selves have something additional to offer along these 
same lines, I would say that I shall be extremely 
thankful for suggestions or criticisms that may serve 
either to add to or take from these outlines, and so 
render them more worthy of public favor, because 
approximating more closely outlines of truth. The 
book of nature and the written Word, having one 
and the same Author, must, when truly correlated, 
"shed light upon each other." 

The delays incident to publishing in California 
and correcting proofs in Eastern Canada may serve 
to explain to the curious some apparent incongrui- 
ties in the contemporary dates referred to in the 
notes and elsewhere. 

G. E. McC. P. 

December, 1901. 



CHAPTER I. 

The Terms Defined, 

The human mind seems prone toward world- 
building. The slightest tendency toward reflective 
thought appears to awaken its latent curiosity as to 
the origin of things; and men in all ages have never 
had to reason very long to see that if a designing 
Mind is really the generating cause of this cosmos, 
ourselves included, not policy alone, but, in the deep- 
est, truest sense, filial duty will lead us to reverence, 
and if possible obey, the great Father of all. The in- 
herent obligations of a creature to its Creator, and the 
necessity of the creature conforming to the funda- 
mental principles of its own being as implanted by 
the Creator, have always been regarded as the high- 
est possible basis of all moral duty and worship, and 
as it is impossible to acknowledge, the claims of one 
Creator and ignore the sweet reasonableness of Chris- 
tianity as the revelation of His love, modern reason- 
ers who are unwilling to admit its claims upon them 
have adopted the only other course possible, and 
have, these three hundred years or so, devoted their 
powers to explaining away the constantly accumulat- 
ing evidence that our universe must have had an 
intelligent Designer. 

They long ago gave over the attempt to maintain 
a dogmatic atheism. No one with the least knowl- 

(13) 



14 Modern Christianity and Modem Science. 

edge of our marvelous universe would dare claim 
that science can ever hope to demonstrate the non- 
existence of a Creator. The atheists of old have 
become the agnostics of our day. In full view of the 
countless evidences of design in nature, and of the 
marvelous and ineluctable laws that regulate the 
movement of everything, from molecule to starry sys- 
tem, they keep telling us over and over again that 
we can not be sure that these laws are the ex- 
pression of an order-loving Mind. The old idea 
of anything' being the result of chance has been 
long exploded; but with strange inconsistency they 
have put in its place, and I might say endowed with 
all its horrible attributes, blind, impersonal, unrec- 
ompensing law — "awful with inevitable fates." 

Strange reasoning! Science has never been able, 
doubtless never will be able, to show us the begin- 
nings of anything — neither of space, nor time, nor 
matter, nor force, nor motion, nor life, nor conscious- 
ness, nor anything at all — no ultimate cause what- 
ever. But by comparison we know that on a small 
scale our wills are active causes. In fact, as Ro- 
manes has said, a personal will such as our own is 
the only real cause of which we have direct experi- 
mental knowledge, or that we can conceive of. 
Therefore, how can we avoid the conclusion that the 
marvelous combinations and adaptations of the uni- 
verse have been brought about by the causative will 
of an infinite personal Being? According to Dugald 
Stewart's two famous axioms: — 

"i. Every effect implies a cause. 

"2. Every combination of means to an end implies 
intelligence." 



The Terms Defined. 15 

Agnostics themselves always talk and reason in 
this manner when they find chipped pieces of flint in 
the earth. But what slender evidences of a designing 
mind does even a polished arrow-head present com- 
pared with even the most degenerate plant or animal 
form! 

When we begin to trace the relations of cause and 
effect anywhere in nature, we are led along by irre- 
sistible logic to the conception of a supreme Mind as 
the only ultimate Cause of which we can conceive. 
When we see anything take place — say the lifting of 
a teakettle lid — we instinctively say it must have had 
a cause. The immediate cause we find is the expand- 
ing steam into which the water has been converted 
by the heat beneath. The heat is traced to the com- 
bustion of the coal; but whence came this energy so 
long latent in the coal? They tell us that it really 
came from the sun, which, ages ago, stored up this 
energy in certain vegetable substances that were then 
laid away in the earth — pigeon-holed, as it were — for 
the convenience of man. But to get at the real ulti- 
mate cause we must go back of the steam and the 
heat, back of the coal and the sun, and ask whence 
they all originated. If they are not self-existent, if 
they did not create themselves — an utterly unthink- 
able idea — there must have been a creating Power 
that originated them. Whence came the wisdom dis- 
played, the idea, the plan of it all? We may say, 
as Spencer has done, that the creation of something 
out of nothing is an unimaginable idea — a "pseudo- 
idea," he calls it. 1 This is partly correct, though, 



l "Biology," I, pp. 336, 337, 



1 6 Modern Christianity and Modern Science. 

like most other cavils of this ingenious critic, it is 
based on a misconception. We have no need of jus- 
tifying the idea that the material universe was cre- 
ated out of absolutely nothing. But "nothing," as 
generally understood, means merely no substance 
appreciable by our senses. It does not exclude spir- 
itual substance as preexisting with God Himself. 
Paul explains this in Heb. 1 1 13. He says we under- 
stand by faith that the worlds were not framed "of 
things which do appear." God may have created, 
and doubtless did create, what we call matter out 
of spiritual substance coexisting with Himself from 
eternity. 

But, in a more limited, accommodated sense, we 
know that the human mind is constantly causing 
ideas, images, and inventions to exist that as such 
did not exist before, and is thus creating these ideas 
in the ordinary meaning of the term. When Long- 
fellow composed his "Evangeline," he certainly 
caused something to exist which did not exist before. 
A man can not get a patent on a machine unless he 
can in this small way prove his kinship with the 
Creator. And until our faculties have been per- 
verted by the subtilties of a false philosophy, we can 
not look upon any work of this kind without saying 
that it must be the work of mind. Dr. Paley's classic 
illustration of the watch as proof of an intelligent 
watchmaker has been met with many a sneer and 
quibble by unbelievers, but it has never been an- 
swered. But all such inventions or creations as 
these are limited, and are only imperfect types of abso- 
lute creation. When we come to contemplate the 



The Terms Defined. 17 

great machine of our cosmos, a thousand times more 
marvelous than any creation of man's, our minds 
expand to the contemplation of absolutely limitless 
Power and unsearchable Wisdom — an uncondi- 
tioned, eternal Mind. 

The nature and origin of the chemical elements, 
whose undivided parts we call atoms, is one of the 
problems that scientists have long labored upon in 
vain. Whence came they, with their invariable and 
ineffaceable properties stamped upon them, as James 
Clerk. Maxwell remarks, "incapable of growth or de- 
cay, of generation or destruction"? Whence came 
these millions of exact duplicates of one another 
which through all the changes of nature continue un- 
broken and unworn — the exact equality of one to 
each of all the rest giving them "the essential char- 
acter of a manufactured article"? Whence came they 
save from the mold of the great Master-Builder, "who 
in the beginning created, not only the heaven and 
the earth, but the materials of which heaven and earth 
consist"? 

The all-pervading character of law, so far from be- 
ing against this idea, is one of the strongest of proofs 
that an order-loving Manager is at the head of the 
universe. A system of religion which all acknowl- 
edge has given to the world its highest conceptions of 
mental or moral laws, has surely nothing to fear, but 
everything to gain, from the proof of physical law be- 
ing equally certain and eternal. "Till heaven and 
earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in nowise pass 
from the law." 



1 8 Modern Christianity and Modern Science. 

"God is law, say the wise, O soul, and let us rejoice; 
For if He thunder by law, the thunder is yet His voice, 
Speak to Him thou, for He hears, and spirit with spirit may 

meet, 
For closer is He than breathing and nearer than hands and feet." 

For half a century or so the evolution theory has 
furnished the only "orthodox" scientific method of 
classifying or explaining phenomena; though, as I 
have said, they long ago gave up looking for real 
origins or ultimate causes. But within recent years 
we have arrived at another stage in the develop- 
ment of this idea, in the astonishing way in which 
the current religious thought has imbibed and even 
assimilated it. Thirty years ago, or even less, it 
seemed as if agnosticism and materialism would soon 
become supreme, and relegate Christianity to the mu- 
seums as a curiosity of the past. But as it was in 
the days of the Roman Empire, in the conflict be- 
tween the Christianity and philosophy of that day, 
the former would not down. Pagan philosophy con- 
quered only when it got baptized and was admitted 
to the church, though I shall not here attempt to 
further trace the result. In a similar manner to-day, 
and without in any way changing their ideas concern- 
ing the origin of man, the evolutionists have quite 
generally become reverent, if not religious. They 
no longer sneer at religion or Christianity per se. 
They have found they can not by the scientific meth- 
ods get at ultimate causes; but the rational demand 
for an ultimate cause can not be silenced in the minds 
of thinking men. If we can not get back of material- 
istic conceptions by purely scientific methods, we 
must leave this task to a rational philosophy. We 



The Terms Defined. 19 

must not lay upon science a task that in the very 
nature of things it can not perform; we must not ex- 
pect it to go outside of its own domain and solve 
questions in philosophy that have taxed the human 
mind for ages. When these things are realized it is 
seen that even if all present phenomena have come 
about through the process which we call evolution, 
yet even then our cosmos demands a Creator just 
the same as before. The marvelous discoveries of 
recent years, so far from demonstrating or even 
encouraging materialism, seem to have acted more 
like a reductio ad absurdum. 

But, more than this, not only has nature led them 
to theism — they seem also to have decided that a 
religion of some sort is an indispensable adjunct to 
civilization. Plato, in his ideal "Republic," con- 
sidered that he would have to have some religion 
taught to the whole people, even though it should 
only be founded on pure fiction manufactured for the 
occasion. The Romans had the same idea. The later 
leaders of the French Revolution adopted similar 
methods. In fact, legislators haye universally rea- 
soned in the same way, deciding that a religion of 
some kind the people must have. Prof. Huxley has 
left himself on record as saying, "I do believe that 
the human race is not yet, possibly may never be, in 
a position to dispense with it." 2 Even Spencer was 
afraid that if the restraints of the popular ideas about 
divine authority were swept away, "before another 
and fitter regulative system had grown up to replace 



2 "Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley, F. R. S.," vol. 
2, p. 300, by Leonard Huxley. Macmillan & Co., 1900. 



20 Modem Christianity and Modern Science. 

it," the results might be "disastrous." 3 Hence, mod- 
ern evolutionists seem to have decided that as Chris- 
tianity is the best yet developed, it is decidedly the 
fittest to survive, and so they are willing to make 
some effort to assist in the process. 4 

Of course, we all understand that it is not the 
old-style Christianity of Paul and his age that is thus 
becoming popular with scientists. It is doubtful if 
all of them even call it Christianity. It is "Theism," 
the belief in God as the author, if not exactly the 
creator, of the universe. Also, the Bible — though of 
course containing many crude ideas of God, as they 
say — when weighed and purified by the winnow- 
ing processes of the Higher Criticism, they admit 
contains the most sublime ideas we have of human 
life and destiny. These they say will undoubtedly 
bear the test of reason and science, and hence must 
be among the eternal realities. 

And I can not refrain from inserting here a few 
words concerning the way in which the current teach- 
ings of science have contributed to build up a great 
system of scientific dogmatism that, as far as ordinary 
people are concerned, is as verily a system of trust in 
human authority as any ecclesiasticism of the past. 
In all this I shall try to be fair and just to every one. 



3 "The Data of Ethics," preface. By Herbert Spencer, 1884. 

4 Cf. James Russell Lowell's remarks in his famous after-dinner 
speech about what men ought to be thankful for "who live in ease 
and luxury, indulging themselves in the amusement of going 
without a religion." Also Mathew Arnold's challenge, "Point out 
ten square miles on the surface of the globe which have not 
come under the influence of Christianity where the life of man 
and the honor of woman are safe." 



The Terms Defined. 21 

But the subject of evolution is a large one. Its sys- 
tem of supposed evidences constitutes a vast complex 
of material, while very few even of the scientific lead- 
ers profess a personal mastery of as much as half the 
material depended on. Each particular line of facts 
and theories has been developed and elaborated by 
some one or more specialists, while their brother 
specialists in some other line of work are disposed to 
take on their dicta the general results of their work, 
which often consists of an indistinguishable compound 
of facts and theories. 5 Each depends on the others 
for those collaterals of the general evidence that are 
outside of his own particular line, and a premium has 
all along been placed on this general tendency by the 
disposition among many of them, notably Mr. Spen- 
cer, and the many who have copied his peculiar meth- 
ods of argument, to rule out of court every other 
possible explanation, and to declare any given facts 
under consideration to be "inexplicable" on any other 
view but their own. I will not now speak of the no- 
torious teaching of the former, where he says that 
''before it can be ascertained how organized beings 
have been gradually evolved, there must be reached 
the conviction that they have been gradually 



5 Cf. Haeckel's well-known line of argument, which is based 
almost entirely upon the idea that the embryonic life of the indi- 
vidual is but a brief recapitulation, as It were by memory, of the 
general history of the species through geological time; though, as 
we shall see in chapter V of this book, this geological succession 
in time instead of being proved by geology is only one of its pri- 
mary assumptions, utterly incapable of any proof whatever. Even 
Spencer's argument is almost as much dependent upon these 
supposed proved facts of geologic succession. 



22 Modern Christianity and Modern Science. 

evolved;" or where he says we must "reconcile the 
facts" of organized life with his supposed universal 
laws of matter and motion. 6 But all of them so 
continually ignore that most primary law of all 
scientific evidence which says that before a thing- 
can be considered proved the evidence in its sup- 
port must not only tend to explain all the general 
facts in the case, but must be of a nature to ex- 
clude every other explanation. Too often all the 
recognition we find of this latter principle is the 
ipse dixit of such men as Spencer repeated in page 
after page, that on any other view the given facts 
would be "inexplicable." So that, taken altogether, 
we have seen growing up before our eyes a vast sys- 
tem of scientific dogmatism founded upon the author- 
ity of scientific experts, which, for the people of our 
age, has replaced the ecclesiastical authority of for- 
mer periods. But any such trust in mere human 
authority in matters of belief concerning origins and 
duty is the greatest foe to true intellectual freedom 
that our world has ever seen. 

But to understand how this change has come 
about, we must look upon it from the standpoint of 
Protestant orthodoxy. After all, it is the latter that 
has changed, not the scientists. It is doubtful 
whether this modern theistic evolution differs much 
from Huxley's well-known admiration for the ethical 
teaching of the New Testament, already alluded to. 
But for years the average intelligent church-member, 
to say nothing of the ministers and theologians, had 
felt himself compelled to be acquainted with the fash- 



6< 'Biology," I, pp. 408-410 (Italics mine). 



The Terms Defined. 23 

ionable scientific theories. Orthodoxy, however, did 
not supply them with the proper premises to examine 
the current science to advantage. To say nothing of 
some other points to be mentioned later, the whole 
religious world had already gone back on the Mosaic 
record of a universal deluge (let not the reader smile), 
and had almost universally adopted Dana and Daw- 
son's day-period theory of creation as explaining the 
geological facts. And therefore, with this travesty of 
what the Bible really teaches — for I can call it noth- 
ing else — they were not in a position to judge of the 
comparative merits of the two systems. In the geo- 
logical succession of life on the globe through count- 
less ages, they had already swallowed the skeleton of 
the evolution theory without knowing it. Accord- 
ingly, when they took up the examination of Dar- 
winism from this insufficient standpoint, they were 
not long in seeing the weak and inconsistent position 
in which they stood. Thus they began the task of 
orienting their religious ideas, particularly as to the 
inspiration of the Bible, in accordance with the sup- 
posedly "proved" deductions of science. And so the 
work has gone on until orthodox Protestantism is 
to-day very different in teaching and spirit from the 
church of fifty years ago, from that of the early re- 
formers or the primitive Christians; different, in fact, 
from the wilderness church of all ages, but resembling 
in its spirit, its philosophy, and in its practical impo- 
tence in fulfilling Christ's last commission, the proud 
Pharisaic church of all ages, which history declares 
has been too often a persecuting power. 

But, side by side with this movement of Protes- 



24 Modern Christianity and Modern Science. 

tantism bodily toward the evolutionist's standpoint, 
has been another equally well-marked movement get- 
ting back to the old paths and the old-time spirit of 
the gospel. Old-fashioned Christianity is not dead, 
but as yet is not confined to any one organization. 
There are old-fashioned followers of Christ in all the 
churches, who "sigh and cry for the abominations 
that are done in the midst thereof," and who it may 
be said are doing all the practical old-fashioned kind 
of work that Christ and His apostles did. It can not 
exactly be called a reaction against the rationalism 
of the Higher Criticism, for the latter is the child of 
yesterday; the former, hoary as the hills. And, so 
far as we can judge, the reaction, if such it may be 
called, against the "Higher Criticism" generally leads 
to Ritualism and the Roman Catholic Church. The 
latter is certainly the only branch of Christendom that 
has in either numbers or prestige gained as a body 
by the work of the higher critics. But this truly 
modern Christianity is like none of these. In fact, it 
is the exact opposite alike of ritualistic formalism and 
skeptical rationalism. It is instinct with life through 
vitalizing faith in a living, personal, and complete Sa- 
viour; and, while especially insistent on the perpetu- 
ity and interdependence — yea, identity — of all spirit- 
ual, moral, and physical law, it keeps clearly in mind 
that the current deductions of science as to origins 
are infinitely less reliable than the Word of the eter- 
nal God, which has been handed down to us at such 
a cost of suffering and blood. The same spirit that 
called out Abraham from his country and his kin- 
dred; that sent Elijah to the king of Israel and John 
the Baptist to the people of Judea with messages of 



The Terms Defined- 25 

reform; that directed the tent-maker in his self- 
supporting missionary wanderings; that supported 
the Waldenses in their long-continued struggles for 
freedom among the mountains, and the martyrs of all 
ages in proclaiming their message of soul-liberty in 
face of the most frightful tortures and death — this 
same spirit is now sending abroad "to every nation, 
and kindred, and tongue, and people," the spiritual 
children of the reformers and martyrs of all past 
time. 

They realize that if there is any truth whatever in 
the mission of Christ and Christianity, we can not 
hope to improve either His spirit and methods, or the 
fundamental doctrines of the church which He estab- 
lished, as revealed in our only Text-book on the sub- 
ject. A reform and a return to these primitive princi- 
ples is the next thing in order for every one who 
wishes to get his bearings toward the present-day 
problems of either politics or science. 

As for their views on inspiration, I may say in a 
few words that they are not very much concerned 
about the "original documents" from which the Bib- 
lical writers "compiled" their books. They do not 
presume to cut and divide it, calling some parts true 
and others mythical, to suit their own preconceived 
ideas, making all the Bible nothing but the gropings 
after the Infinite of men more or less good and wise. 
In the very nature of things, when we begin to do 
this, all reverence for it as the special revelation of the 
Creator to us of the twentieth century must long since 
have vanished. Certainly this is not treating it as 
Wesley, Luther, Wycliffe, the apostles, or even Christ 



26 Modern Christianity and Modern Science. 

Himself treated it. "When men, compassed with hu- 
man infirmities, affected in a greater or less degree by 
surrounding influences, and having hereditary and 
cultivated tendencies, which are far from making 
them wise or heavenly-minded, undertake to arraign 
the Holy Scriptures, and to pass judgment upon 
what is divine and what is human," they are certainly 
taking the ground of the unbeliever, and have no 
right to arrogate to themselves the name of Chris- 
tian. 

But this point will be further considered in chapter 
VIII. I need only remark here that, like the historic 
church, these modern believers would no more at- 
tempt to explain the mystery of the written Word 
than that of the incarnate Word — Christ Himself. 
There is the same indefinable blending of the divine 
and the human, sublime, incomprehensible. When 
we begin to dissect and separate the one from the 
other, all reverence must certainly have departed, to 
say nothing of faith. It would be useless, if nothing 
more, to work in fields so far beyond the limits of the 
human mind, rushing boldly in where angels fear to 
tread. 

The written Word presents the same mystery of 
incarnation that the world saw some nineteen cen- 
turies ago. The divine is there, the human is there. 
We can find either of them that we look for; but we 
shall not see the divine Spirit, with its searching per- 
sonal lessons for our souls, by dissecting the dry bones 
of its literary construction. In coming to earth, 
Christ doubtless assumed the physical and even the 
mental peculiarities of the Hebrews, — not the Aryans, 
— just as the written Word also displays many 



The Terms Defined. 27 

touches that picture the heredity and environment of 
the writers. It is even written of Christ that He "was 
made in the likeness of sinful flesh" though "in Him 
was no sin." Just so with the Bible. We may find 
traces of the limited ideas, almost the prejudices, of 
the authors; but God kept them from blundering to 
our confusion in this twentieth century. 

But before going further into the study of what 
this modern Christianity is like, we must glance back- 
ward at some of the conflicts and questions of other 
days. 

In the days of the apostles the Greeks were the 
great philosophers and scientists. They had dived 
deep into nature, and had got all that the unaided 
human senses could then discover. Our moderns 
may smile at the spontaneous generation of Lucre- 
tius, and the eternal uniformity of the present order 
of nature as set forth by Aristotle, even if they ad- 
mire Anaximander and his fellows for teaching the 
transmutation of species and a kind of Greek Dar- 
winism. But we must not think ourselves so far su- 
perior. Our petty knowledge of certain mechanical 
contrivances has done much to swell the inordinate 
vanity of the present generation; but it is certain that 
it can not "carry us one step further into real nature ;'' 
and it may not show us possessed of any firmer or 
more disciplined minds than they had back there, who 
wrestled, as we are doing, with the great world prob- 
lems of existence. Their literature has been imitated 
for over two thousand years; their art has been the 
despair of every generation since; and their civiliza- 
tion, which culminated in the Roman Empire, ex- 



28 Modern Christianity and Modern Science. 

hibited, for at least half a dozen times the length of 
our boasted century of progress, a development of 
law and government that we have not surpassed. 

Into such a world, proud of its wisdom like the 
present, came Paul with his simple story of the cru- 
cified One, the incarnate Creator dying to show His 
love for His creatures. In spite of all that our mod- 
ern critics may have to say to the contrary, his story 
was just the same as that which had comforted Job in 
his affliction with the knowledge that his Redeemer 
lived and would "stand at the latter day upon the 
earth" (Job 19:25); had directed the mind of Moses 
in governing his rebellious millions; and had tuned 
the harps of David, Isaiah, and the other Hebrew 
bards. He had definite and clear ideas as to the past 
of our world; and to those who by philosophy were 
trying to persuade themselves of inherent natural im- 
mortality, he showed that a future life can be attained 
only through a resurrection and a glorification of our 
present bodies. 7 His future for our world was no less 
plain. "Evil men and seducers shall wax worse and 
worse, deceiving and being deceived." "In the last 
days perilous times shall come." 8 But when some of 
his Thessalonian converts obtained the impression 
from his first epistle that these evil times and the 
second coming of Christ were right upon them, 
he wrote them positive assurance to the contrary: 
"Let no man deceive you by any means; for that 
day shall not come, except there come a falling 



7 1 Cor. 15 : 16-18, et seq. 

8 2 Tim. 3: 13, 1. 



The Terms Defined. 29 

away first, and that man of sin be revealed, the 
son of perdition; who opposeth and exalteth himself 
above all that is called God, or that is worshiped; so 
that he as God sitteth in the temple of God, showing 
himself that he is God." "For the mystery of law- 
lessness doth already work; only there is one that 
restraineth now, until he be taken out of the way." 9 
Men smiled and argued when he spoke to them of 
Jesus and the resurrection. But he could stand in * 
their own chosen assembly of wisdom, and demon- 
strate to them that he had a science and a philosophy 
of life compared with which theirs was but childish 
prattle. 

The distance of eighteen centuries or so has given 
us a perspective from which to judge of the relative 
merits of the science and philosophy of that day, as 
opposed to that Christianity. They say a great 
change has come about since then in the questions 
involved. But aside from the comprehensive doc- 
trine of evolution, it is safe to say that agnostic phi- 
losophy is practically the same to-day as it was in the 
days of Porphyry and Julian. It is the argument of 
men who are continually asking for "more evidence;" 
who raise little quibbles about the Bible's use of the 
words "firmament," "sky," or "earth," or about two 
demoniacs being mentioned in one place and only 
one in another; and who reiterate the statement that 
we "can not believe" that strange events, like the Del- 
uge or the raising of the dead, ever took place in the 
past, because we do not see similar events taking 
place to-day. So that, apart from the doctrine of evo- 

9 2Thess. 2:3, 4, 7, R. V. 



30 Modern Christianity and Modern Science. 

lution, the philosophic objections to the Christian re- 
ligion are to-day no more than those that the church 
has had to meet in all ages, and has so constantly 
lived down and overcome. Ninety-nine per cent of 
all modern arguments against the Bible and its re- 
ligion are grounded on the supposed truth of the cur- 
rent theory of evolution; and accordingly this one 
idea, in its various phases, is what I shall endeavor to 
consider, and what I shall mean throughout this 
work when speaking of modern science as opposed 
to Christianity. 

I think it is not necessary for me to attempt here 
to explain the doctrine of evolution as currently 
taught and believed. Darwin is by many supposed 
to have originated it; but Darwin only dealt with 
one division of the subject. In a broader sense we 
find that two divisions of it — the nebular hypothesis 
and uniformitarian geology — are very much older 
than Darwinism, while later advocates of the doctrine 
have elaborated it in detail, and have applied it to 
every department of scientific inquiry. And as the 
theory as a whole naturally falls under four or five 
different heads, I have preferred to give a reasonably 
full statement of the evolution doctrine in these dif- 
ferent departments as they come up for considera- 
tion. 

And one more word on this point as preliminary 
to all discussion. A work like this implies the sa- 
credness of nature and the importance of its study; 
that is, the holy, elevating character there is in all 
honest study of the works of the Creator. His 
works and His written Word are equally divine. I 



The Terms Defined. 31 

will yield to no one in my reverence for true science, 
or in my respect and love for those who have made 
science what it is to-day. The great names of Dar- 
win and Huxley, of Romanes and Mivart, of Lyell 
and Agassiz, with scores of others who might be 
mentioned, living as well as dead, all of whom are 
inseparably connected with the rise and history of 
the doctrine of Evolution, are to me synonyms for 
incarnate honesty and love of truth. It would be 
silly for any one to ask how I can believe them to 
be so honest in purpose and yet so wrong in many 
of their conclusions. Unfortunately, we are all mor- 
tal and fallible. The sincerest love of truth can not 
always emancipate us from our intellectual heredity 
and environment, or the "zeitgeist," as the Germans 
call it in its broadest sense. The premises of Dar- 
winism were established as I have said a century or 
more ago, and, as is usual with great world-errors, 
it is the premises that are wrong, not the conclusions 
only. And, as is usually, almost invariably, the case, 
the fault lies at the door of the church, not of science. 
The defenders of a perverted form of Christianity 
have ever been the most effectual obstacles to the 
progress of truth. So that although in the course 
of the present work I may have occasion to handle 
the arguments and conclusions of modern science 
somewhat roughly, yet the men and their motives are 
inconceivably beyond my reach. The words of my 
Master, "Judge not, that ye be not judged," cer- 
tainly do not point out our attitude toward ideas and 
doctrines, but most positively and surely do they 
indicate the only Christian, or even gentlemanly, 



32 Modern Christianity and Modern Science. 

way of treating the motives and individualities of our 
brother man. Hence, if my words, in some cases, 
seem strong and full of feeling, I wish it expressly 
understood that in all cases it is the ideas and doc- 
trines which I am contending with, not their authors 
or advocates. It is too late in the world's history 
for me to revive or perpetuate that age-old mis- 
take of Christian apologists. Nevertheless, I hope 
that a good deal of energy and luminosity of state- 
ment may be allowed in contrasting what I consider 
error with what I believe to be truth, without in- 
curring the reproach of indulging in personalities, 
or even presumptuous forgetfulness of the impassa- 
ble gulfs which separate me from these modern 
scientists as to knowledge of the details of nature. 

But before resuming our study of this modern re- 
vival or continuation of primitive Christianity, we 
must consider for a moment the kind of Christianity 
with which philosophy has been supposed to be in 
conflict; for, while evolution is in unmistakable con- 
tradiction to the first chapters of Genesis, and a thou- 
sand as direct statements throughout the Bible con- 
cerning man's origin, it is only with something else 
than a literal, common-sense understanding of its 
teaching that philosophy has ever had the slightest 
quarrel. The only argument that the world has ever 
had for pure Christianity has been the fagot and the 
headsman's ax. It has stopped to argue the point 
only with something less than primitive faith and 
earnestness. Such men as Celsus and Porphyry were 
developed only after the church had left the first sim- 
plicity of the apostles. And such modern men as 



The Terms Defined. 33 

Herbert Spencer would not have half a dozen words 
— outside of evolution — to say against anything but 
a similar modern perversion of Biblical teachings. 
The church of the latter half of the second century 
was already well started on the road to Rome. Mod- 
ern Protestantism has not by any means got entirely 
out of Rome and back to the old paths, and of course 
can meet the arguments of opposers only at an enor- 
mous disadvantage. It not only lacks the signs and 
wonders of the early church, but to a great extent, 
also, is not attended by the equally wonderful work 
of transforming evil characters, which has always 
been the most unanswerable of arguments in favor 
of its divine origin. But besides all this, there are 
several points of common logic on which skeptical 
philosophy has decidedly the better of orthodox 
Protestantism. 

The first of these is undoubtedly the immortal-soul 
theory, and its logical conclusion, the horrible doc- 
trine of eternal torture, which has without doubt 
made thousands upon thousands of honest infidels 
and skeptics. But so nearly universal in the modern 
and historic church is this idea that it is often diffi- 
cult to get the honest objector to see that the Bible 
really does not teach such doctrine. Spencer, in his 
well-known "Ecclesiastical Institutions," makes this 
his main point of attack on Christianity. He shows 
most conclusively that all man-made religions are 
founded upon the idea that man has a double or spirit 
capable of existing apart from the body, and which 
does so exist after death; and that since Christianity 
is also based upon this same idea, it must, like all 



34 Modern Christianity and Modern Science. 

other religions, be only a humbug and a system of 
priestcraft. 10 

Now I shall not attempt to prove the Biblical 
teaching on this subject. I shall have to refer the 
reader to the numerous tracts and books treating on 
the matter, and confine myself to three dogmatic 
statements. 

1. No well-informed person will, I think, claim 
that the Old Testament teaches the natural immor- 
tality of the soul, or that the Hebrews of that period 
believed in it. 

2. It is only found in the New Testament by con- 
founding the promise of a resurrection and a future 
life with the essentially heathen idea of a double that 
is capable of existing apart from the body. 

3. From Justin Martyr down to the present day 
many of the brightest lights of the church, such as 
William Tyndale, Milton, and Martin Luther, have 
denied it in toto; and hundreds of thousands to-day, 
through all the churches, do the same, looking for- 



^The writer is aware that Mr. Spencer's ghost theory has 
never been very popular, and that since the publication of 
Professor Robertson Smith's "Religion of the Semites," and Dr. 
J. G. Frazer's "Golden Bough," it has been largely discarded 
among the learned as explaining the origin of religions. This 
only illustrates the well-known fact that men would far rather 
give up the idea of a divine revelation, almost rather that of one 
supreme God, than surrender the self-pleasing, though utterly 
irrational, doctrine of an immortal soul. Indeed, how many 
professed Christian writers have made this almost their sole 
point of attack on Darwinism, — that it destroys this idea of an 
immortal soul! They seem to forget that it was not exactly the 
father of truth who is credited with that very ancient declaration: 
"Ye shall not surely die. ... Ye shall be as God." R. V. 



"The Terms Defined. 35 

ward to a future life only as the gift of Christ through 
a resurrection. 

The second vantage ground of philosophy comes, 
perhaps, from the almost universal neglect to pre- 
serve a clear-cut distinction between the obligations 
of religion and the duties we owe to civil government. 

The second vantage ground of philosophy comes, 
the most ''unutterably saddening" pages of history, 
that Huxley spoke of with such despair; 11 and, de- 
spite of the Reformation, despite of Roger Williams, 
despite of the ringing cries of freedom that were heard 
in 1776, the whole world seems to be rushing along 
the same road that the Romans traversed under Con- 
stantine in the fourth century; though it would seem 
that no sane man would wish to land modern society 
in that wilderness of woe to which he and his bishops 
conducted the deluded church. 

I shall not mention other points; but the clinging 
to these and other traces of popery or heathenism 
has entailed habits of acting and reasoning that 
would long ago have been outgrown and discarded 
had the church continued along the lines laid down 
in the sixteenth century. 

The way in which these teachings put arguments 
into the mouth of the agnostic is very evident. Not 
only are they indefensible from the standpoint of rea- 
son, but in defending them the church has been led 
to adopt views of inspiration and methods of "inter- 
pretation" that have developed, logically enough, 
into the "Higher Criticism," which may be called a 
hybrid between the religion and the science of the 



11 Nineteenth Century, February, 1889. 



36 Modern Christianity and Modern Science. 

day, and which, like all other hybrids, is utterly use- 
less in generating anything for the good of the world. 
But the "Higher Criticism" is fast becoming ortho- 
dox, though reverting more and more to the agnostic 
type, and, together with theistic evolution, occupy- 
ing, as we have suggested, about the same posi- 
tion that Huxley did a quarter of a century ago. 
while many of the more devout and pietistic in the 
churches, like Dr. B. F. Da Costa, and the High 
Church party of England, are fleeing in the opposite 
direction into the open arms of that personification 
of ecclesiasticism, the Roman Catholic Church. 
These two movements are fast dividing the modern 
world between them. It is to-day a very exceptional 
congregation in any of the popular churches that is 
not working in either the one direction or the other. 

But out of them both, and from the still darker 
regions beyond, the Lord is gathering and training 
a people who not only do not attempt to apologize 
or explain away the Bible, but who are continually 
translating it into e very-day life as an object lesson 
for the world. 

Do you ask where this relic of a bygone age is 
to be found, and under what name? No doubt in 
your own town or village; doubtless, also, under va- 
rious names. Her children may be so obscure that 
you have not considered them worthy of your notice. 
They are sighing and crying for the abominations 
that are daily practised about them in the name of 
their Master, though they may still be clinging, with 
the love born of fond memories, to associations and 
institutions that they sadly confess have, as bodies, 



The Terms Defined. 37 

lost their power to represent their Master and Lord. 
As they go about their daily work of ministering to 
the neglected, the fallen, and the lost, you see little 
about these earnest souls in the great dailies; but, 
in the language of John the Baptist, "there standeth 
One among you whom ye know not." The best an- 
swer to skepticism is this modern incarnate Chris- 
tianity; the best protection against ecclesiasticism is 
a touch of the living faith that will take us out into 
the highways and byways of the world, proclaiming 
salvation from sin and its consequences as the simple 
gift of God; seeking not to save the state, but the 
individual; not to purify the politics of the world, but 
to gather out of the nations a people for His name. 

Thus the vitalized Christianity that many believed 
to be only a thing of the past, only an idealized crea- 
tion of the historic imagination, is incarnate in the 
world to-day. It is gathering fresh courage and 
strength from every advance that is made in the dis- 
covery of chemical or physiological law; and from 
every new though saddening development in the so- 
cial, political, or international world problems. It is 
going about the world intent upon the same work as 
its Master did through Galilee and Jerusalem, and, 
like Him, pleading with the modern dead formal- 
ism: "O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, thou that killest the 
prophets, and stonest them which are sent unto thee, 
how often would I have gathered thy children to- 
gether, even as a hen gathereth her chickens under 
her wings, and ye would not! Behold, your house 
is left unto you desolate." 



CHAPTER II. 

Divine Immanence. 

The Bible student will remember that throughout 
the Hebrew prophets God's creative energy, and His 
ability to reveal the future, are the usual and almost 
the entire proofs which He advances of His power, 
and of His right to demand our worship and obedi- 
ence. 1 The same thought is largely carried out 
throughout the whole Bible. Evolution is supposed 
to more or less explain away the former, while the 
"Higher Criticism" strikes at the very foundation of 
the latter. Between them they have so far discred- 
ited the Bible in the eyes of the common people that, 
as the result of their fifty years' work of poking fun 
at its "nursery yarns," it is practically removed as 
far from every-day thought and life as it was in the 
Middle Ages, when the people were unable to get it 
or to read it. The results are the same in both cases 
— increasing crime and lawlessness, and once more 
the triumph of might over right; the proud, exultant 
shouts of despotisms, civil and ecclesiastical, with 
their feet upon the prostrate neck of liberty, fondly 
imagining that this triumph is permanent and eternal. 
The study of prophecy as a proof of inspiration is 
beyond my purpose, but in this chapter I shall try to 
set forth the teachings of the Bible and the book of 



1 See Isaiah 40 : 25, 26; 41 : 21, 23, etc. 
(38) 



Divine Immanence. 39 

nature concerning God's relation to His created 
works. 

In taking up the study of what the Bible says on 
the subject, we are immediately led to the Sabbath. 
This is one of the two institutions that, according 
to the Bible, man brought with him from beyond the 
gates of Paradise, a souvenir of that happy time and 
of the universal fatherhood of God. Hallowed by the 
Creator's example and blessing, it was given to the 
race to point them to God's created works as a re- 
minder of their relation to Him as creatures; and that 
through the study of nature's works on the blessed 
rest day, men's minds might be wooed away from the 
things of time and sense, and directed to the study 
of the great Creator of all. 

Now, I care not to speak of the Sabbath in so far 
as it is a matter of controversy concerning the day 
to be observed. The Sabbath as an institution is as 
broad as Christendom, and as old as religion; and 
in so far as it has any meaning whatever, it is the 
sign or reminder of God's power and wisdom to 
create, and of His power and love to recreate or re- 
deem: the two most fundamental conceptions of all 
religion. And as the souvenir of these attributes of 
God, it is of especial importance to-day, when God's 
position as Creator and His character as revealed in 
His works are so universally denied or ignored. 

It will require no effort to make plain that right 
ideas concerning God's relation to us and the works 
of nature lie at the very basis of all morality. Phi- 
losophers have in all ages sought for the ultimate 
basis of morality — why certain things are right and 
others are wrong. Unbelievers, who deny a personal 



4-0 Modern Christianity and Modem Science. 

Creator, have never been able to find any higher rea- 
son for right and wrong than policy, and the good of 
society. Hence, they have never been able to show 
any great evil in such things as pride and envy, and 
others of the darkest passions of the human heart, 
because they can not be proved to be against the well- 
being of others. But the idea of creation brings in 
higher motives, and a higher reason for right and 
wrong. Because God created us, we are under infinite 
obligations to worship and obey Him. Moral duties, 
then, are such as inhere in our relationship to God as 
creatures. Hence, we see also that the Sabbath, as 
the sign of our relation to God, is the souvenir or 
reminder of all moral obligation. 

It is particularly of value to-day, when men have 
so universally banished the Creator from common 
thought and life, like some great absentee landlord 
governing his estates by delegated agents, which we 
call gravity, light, heat, electricity, magnetism, chem- 
ical affinity, etc. As Le Conte remarks, the people 
of our age have practically forgotten the great Cre- 
ator, and only recognize these delegates, which they 
have organized into a great scientific polytheism, and 
seated in the temple of the universe. "These be thy 
gods, O Israel," they keep telling us, "which brought 
thee out of the land of Egyptian darkness and ig- 
norance. These be the only gods ye need to fear or 
study about in any manner." Is it so very far a trans- 
ition from this to the nature-worship of the ancients? 
The first glimpses that we get of the Assyrians and 
the Egyptians in the tablets and monuments which 
they have left, give us gleams of a previous higher 



> 



Divine Immanence. 41 

state of civilization and a purer religion — the after- 
glow of a time almost forgotten. Had they not, 
probably, passed through the same stages of religious 
faith degenerating into materialism, and thence into 
nature worship, which we have at least seen started 
in our own age? 

The development of any great system of thought c; 
like that of modern scientific doubt of the Bible, can /' 
only be rightly understood in its historical aspect. 
Those who are convinced that evolution is really 
wrong will wish to see how one part of it after an- 
other was taught as fast as the world would swallow 
them, until Darwin and Spencer have completed the 
process, and almost the whole educated world of our 
times is sincere in the belief that man has developed 
from the lower forms of life, through countless ages, 
to what he is to-day. This full-fledged evolution was 
not possible without geology — in fact, geology fur- 
nishes nine-tenths of its argument; and geology, as 
we shall see in a subsequent chapter, is based on two 
fundamental assumptions : — 

1. That the action of the elements has been uni- 
form with the present in character, perhaps in de- 
gree, during all past time. 

2. That there has been a gradual succession, per- 
haps development, in the life upon the globe. 

"But besides these two basic ideas, evolution is also 
materially dependent upon that other notion that 
matter is itself endowed with certain properties by 
means of which it acts, all phenomena being but the 
outcome of this endowment of matter. Some may, 
of course, regard this materialism as the result rather 



42 Modern Christianity and Modem Science. 

than the assumption of evolution, but it will be neces- 
sary to consider this idea first before examining the 
theory in detail. 

Until Kepler and his three famous laws, men had 
no conception of the orderly arrangements of the 
solar system. Had he been asked the ultimate cause 
of these beautiful laws, he could only have replied, 
"The creative will of God." But then Newton came 
forward and gave another, a secondary, a physical 
cause. He showed all these orderly arrangements to 
be the necessary result of universal gravitation. Here 
the philosophers had something that they thought 
banished God from the heavens, at least. We all 
know that Newton himself was a reverent Christian, 
as, indeed, have been most of the really great discov- 
erers in nature. But, as Le Conte remarks, his re- 
sults were eagerly seized upon by Voltaire and his 
school, encouraging the fashionable skepticism of the 
eighteenth century which culminated in the blasphe- 
mies of the French Revolution But then came 
chemistry, the microscope, and electricity, with all 
their associated wonders, until now we see law and 
order pervading the whole cosmos, from the mote 
dancing in the sunbeam to the planets rolling on 
through space in their trackless paths. 

Of course, I do not mean to say that we understand 
all these marvelous laws. But we have got far 
enough to see their correlation: that such things as 
gravity, electricity, magnetism, light, heat, chemical 
affinity, etc., are transmutable into one another back 
and forth without loss, and hence must be only dif- 
ferent manifestations of one universal, omnipresent 



Divine Immanence. 43 

energy. Even vital force is now correlated with the 
others, so that the amount of vital action in both 
plants and animals is strictly proportionate to the 
amount of food used. 

Hence, we see that law and order reign supreme, 
and we are forced to choose between two opposing 
views. Either the first cause is far more closely 
connected with nature, and carries on all natural phe- 
nomena in a far more direct way, than we are accus- 
tomed to think, or else nature operates itself and 
needs no God whatever. To us moderns there is 
really no middle position possible. 

But the origin of the crystal or of the solar system, 
as we have already shown in the previous chapter, 
leads us irresistibly to the conception of an intelligent 
Designer. I need not repeat the argument here. 
We then ask, Does He act directly, or has He en- 
dowed matter with certain properties? Does He 
act immediately upon matter, producing all its mani- 
festations, or has He delegated His authority to the 
molecules by establishing fixed laws for them, and 
then retiring, like some "absentee landlord"? When 
we consider simply dead matter, we may not be able 
to come to a definite conclusion, or might, possibly, 
incline to the latter view. But when we consider 
life, and the processes which we call vital, we begin 
to get clearer ideas. Vital processes are at the very 
least not interpretable in the terms of physics and 
chemistry. This is strikingly shown when the organ- 
ism dies; for then the chemical forces regain their 
power and reduce the whole to a mere mass of inor- 
ganic molecules, the gastric juice eating its way 



/ 



44 Modern Christianity and Modern Science, 

through the very stomach that secreted it. Here is 
plainly something that the theory of inherent proper- 
ties delegated to matter will not explain. No amount 
of imaginary properties delegated to the molecules 
will explain the processes of life. 2 The Creator must 
act directly on all these; but, as we have seen, the 
amount of vital force in any organism is as strictly 
proportionate to the amount of food consumed as is 
the amount of steam generated proportionate to the 
coal burned beneath the boiler. The consideration 
of the first cause in even inanimate nature having 
without fail led us to the conception of a Creator, the 
correlation of forces demonstrates the doctrine of 
divine immanence. And thus the idea that matter 
contains in itself the "promise and potency" of all 
phenomena, as Tyndall says, is seen to be an assump- 
tion, not a conclusion, of the materialistic scientists — 
and that in face of the countless evidences of design 
pervading all nature, eloquent of a Mind as their ulti- 
mate cause, even the atom bearing the stamp of a 
"manufactured article." 

But, because there is no third view of nature, and 
men refuse to see the beauty of this doctrine of the 
Divine Immanence, looking only at the dreadful near- 
ness of the Deity as revealing too vividly their own 
wretched shortcoming and spiritual nakedness, they 
throw away their Bibles and drift upon the cruel rocks 



2 The leading article in Nature for Aug. i, 1901, opens with 
a sentence describing the present as a time "when many, if not 
most, biologists are confessing that they find no helpful anal- 
ogy between the operations of not-living matter and the adaptive 
and coordinating activities of the living organism." 



Divine Immanence. 45 

of sheer materialism, saying that matter is eternal and 
has latent in itself all the properties by means of which 
it acts and works, even the marvelous powers of a 
Newton or a Kelvin being originally latent in the 
nebula. 

This was the way it acted thirty or forty years ago, 
in man's first flush of conquest over some of the more 
marvelous mysteries of nature, and the hope that 
evolution would ultimately explain them all. But 
pretty soon the deeper thinkers began to see that not 
even thus had they dispensed with a real first cause. 
Even supposing the solar system, ourselves included, 
started as a nebula and began to contract, what 
started it? How could its motion begin without 
some outside cause? Or what but a designing Mind 
ever stamped upon the atoms their marvelous "prop- 
erties" and their exact similarity to one another, giv- 
ing them all the character of the manufactured ar- 
ticle? Even an out-and-out infidel like Herbert Spen- 
cer can, amid the mysteries of nature, find, "the one 
absolute certainty — that he [man] is ever in presence 
of an infinite and eternal Energy, from which all 
things proceed." 3 He and a few of his more ardent 
admirers may declare that science must ever remain 
agnostic; that we can not know that this eternal en- 
ergy is endowed with intelligence; but of late years, 
as we have seen, the current is setting strongly the 
other way, and we have the modern phenomenon of 
almost all evolutionists becoming reverent, or even 
theistic. 

We must now see what the Bible says about the re- 

3 ''Ecclesiastical Institutions,' ' p. 843, D. Appleton & Co. 



s 



46 Modern Christianity and Modern Science. 

lationship of God to nature. Here we shall have no 
difficulty, for it makes the matter very plain. It very 
positively recognizes the direct and immediate action 
of God in every event and phenomenon of nature; and 
what we used to think only the highly figurative ex- 
pressions of the Hebrew poets is seen to be actual 
science, after all. According to the Bible, certain 
properties have not been imparted to matter, and it 
then left to act through this endowed energy, as even 
most Christians seem to think is the case. Jehovah 
has not delegated His authority to the molecules, nor 
even to the angels, as some theologians would have 
us believe, though doubtless celestial spirits carry on 
a thousand lines of ministry in our cosmos of which 
we have no conception. But who gives them their 
force and energy? Are they not conditioned, and 
thus created beings? But to return. Matter, ac- 
cording to the Bible view, possesses no innate prop- 
erties whatever. It is, of course, all under law; but 
it has not been endowed to act in this manner of 
itself. Nature testifies of an active personal energy, 
a vital presence, continually working through mat- 
ter in certain regular ways; and those few methods 
which we have been able to define and label we call 
the laws of nature. 4 Further, nothing, then, is "su- 



*A striking illustration of the power of God in nature, which, 
though standing alone in particulars, is but one of a milliard in 
character and kind, is the stone tomb in Hanover, Germany 
builded somewhat over a century ago. It was made of large slabs 
of stone bound together by iron bands, and surmounted by a huge 
block weighing a ton and a half. On it was this inscription, " This 
grave is purchased for eternity; it shall never be opened" But a 
little poplar seed was somehow inclosed in the mold within the 



Divine Immanence. 47 

pernatural," but the most uncommon as well as the 
most common acts are all due to the direct act of 
God, or to power which He supplies to free, intelli- - 
gent beings. 

In their beautiful hymn, as recorded by Nehemiah, 
the Levites used to sing, "Thou, even Thou, art Lord 
alone; Thou hast made heaven, the heaven of heav- 
ens, with all their host, the earth, and all things thct 
are therein; . . . and Thou preservest them all." 5 
As far as our world is concerned, creation is com- 
plete, for "the works were finished from the founda- 
tion of the world," and this may be what science 
means by the "conservation of energy;" but the Cre- 
ator's living presence is still manifest in "upholding 
all things by the word of His power." 6 It is not be- 
cause the machine has once been started, and then 
left to act through its own inherent energy, that 
breath and pulse continue their ceaseless rhythm; but 



tomb, and the power of God in the little germ caused it to grow; 
a slender shoot found a crevice between two of the great stones, 
and its hidden power in the tender plant broke the iron bands 
asunder, and moved every stone from its original position. The 
tree still lives, and waves victorious branches over the rent sepul- 
cher, v/hich man in his impotent and limited knowledge declared 
should "never be opened." The mighty power of God in a tiny 
plant that a child could have broken off for a toy whip to lash his 
wooden horse, laughs to scorn the finished work of man to shut 
out God from His own creation. And who has not seen the same 
thing often repeated in the lifting of some large stone by the way- 
side by the upthrusting of a tiny seed in which was the energy of 
the divine! 

5 Neh. 9:6. 

6 Heb. 1:3. 



48 Modem Christianity and Modem Science. 

every rising breast, every throbbing heart, tells us of 
the sleepless watchcare of Him "in whom we live, 
and move, and have our being;" "who is above all, 
and through all, and in you all." 7 Even the wicked, 
who use to God's dishonor the powers of life which 
He has given them, are spoken of in the following 
thrilling language in Isa. 43:24, which is especially 
positive and plain : "Thou hast made Me to serve with 
thy sins, thou hast wearied Me with thine iniquities." 
The Creator is ever at the service of His creatures. 
He attends us into the depths of sin, that He may 
bring us back again; He stays with us in all our folly 
and wrong-doing, and even supplies the power to the 
tongue that curses Him. - 

And this because God has created the mind free, 
and capable of choosing right or wrong. He had all 
the varied forms of nature passively obedient to Him- 
self; all mere automata; but He wished something 
more than this: He wished to see something capable 
of understanding Himself and His motives, and serv- 
ing Him from love — neither from fear nor force. For 
this purpose He created intelligent, free personalities, 
with the implied possibility that they might choose 
something different from the divine way, and hence 
introduced this possibility of evil and confusion in His 
universe for a limited time. 

But, leaving the realm of free will, and going back 
to strictly natural action, we find that the varied 
phenomena of nature are only the objectified modes 
of God's thought; the forces of nature are but the 
different forms of one great all-pervading Energy or 



7 Acts 17:28; Eph. 4:6. 



Divine Immanence. 49 

Will; and the laws of nature are the orderly ways in 
which that Will acts — orderly because He "is not the 
author of confusion," and invariable because He is 
perfect, and therefore unchangeable. He does not 
have to experiment to learn how best to do a thing. 
The universal character of the "great eternal iron 
laws," so far from being against this view of the 
Divine Immanence, is the only thing we should ex- 
pect. He who sees the end from the beginning is 
not to be surprised or driven into some violation of 
His established methods by any emergency that may 
arise. Spiritual, moral, and physical law are one, after 
all, and equally certain, universal, and unchangeable. 
"Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall 
in nowise pass from the law." Matt. 5:18. 

But let not our wise ones dream that they have 
really mastered the A, B, C of natural'law. Only the 
other day it would have been declared utterly im- 
possible for human vision to see through a two-inch 
plank. To-day, with our knowledge of the X-rays, 
thousands can now perform this quondam miracle. 
A few generations ago the sending of news to Eng- 
land and back again in five minutes would have been 
counted "supernatural." It looks now as if we might 
soon do it even without wires. Newton (1642- 1727), 
in speaking of Dan. 12:4, which says that "many 
shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall be in- 
creased," declared, on the strength of it, "I should not 
wonder if some day men will travel at the rate of 
fifty miles an hour." Half a century later, when much 
more was known of the power of steam, Voltaire, 
though very fond of quoting as against the Bible 



50 Modern Christianity and Modern Science. 

Newton's wonderful discoveries in astronomy, 
brought forward the above remark to show how the 
study of the prophecies of the Bible had led the Eng- 
lish philosopher to make a fool of himself; but 
which was the fool, the believer or the doubter? As 
the result of researches with the ultra-violet rays, and 
with the radiations emitted by radium, even the "ulti- 
mate atom" has been shattered into countless frag- 
ments; and what becomes of all the elaborate theories 
or "laws" founded upon its supposed indestructibil- 
ity? 8 Such things should teach us caution, if not 
wisdom. We who worship an omnipotent and om- 
niscient and therefore unchangeable God of nature, 
who declares Himself to be "the same yesterday, to- 
day, and forever," may well believe with Huxley in 
the eternal uniformity of natural law; but the ques- 



8 I have not yet seen that these results lend any support to the 
idea of the real homogeneousness of matter, that is, that all the 
chemical elements are but allotropic forms of some one primal 
element. It has been well remarked that by no " select shuffling " 
of these primordial units can the laws of chemical affinity or the 
diverse qualities of the resulting combinations be made intelligi- 
ble to us. However, we know that protoplasm is alike in all the 
myriad forms of plants and animals, and yet the dictum holds 
good that each cell comes only from some preexisting cell of its 
own kind, omnis cellula e cellula, as the biologists say. But if 
matter is really homogeneous, and thus the action of the chemical 
elements be explained as analogous to this action of the cells, it 
would seem to me only additional proof of the Divine Immanence, 
since nothing but an ever-present Intelligence could keep sub- 
stances made up of exact duplicate parts from acting in the same 
manner under all circumstances — that is, could ever make the 
chemical elements, such as iron, oxygen, etc., maintain their 
individuality throughout nature, as we know they do, even in the 
far-distant stars. 



Divine Immanence. 5 l 

tion is, Are any of us competent to define the limits 
of natural law? For aught we know, the most stu- 
pendous of Biblical miracles, say the raising of the 
dead or the destruction of the ancient world by a 
cosmic deluge, may be as truly according to natural 
law as the metamorphosis of an insect or an ordinary 
cloudburst. For aught we know, the existence of 
spirit beings all about us — not souls of dead people, 
but extra-terrestrial beings — may yet be demon- 
strated by scientific methods, and if we are to judge 
by the scores of learned works now being issued along 
this line, we would think it not only possible, but 
probable. This, be it expressly understood, might 
not change the general attitude of the world toward 
real Christianity one hair's breadth. Ingenious crit- 
ics would still find ways to interpret these facts, 
or would make them the basis for new speculations 
and theories. The Jews were not the only people 
who have required signs and wonders; nor were they 
alone in disregarding some of the plainest that could 
possibly be given. 

As has been already suggested, we are every now 
and then coming across things that contradict some 
law supposed to be universal. These exceptions evi- 
dently come under the head of some higher law that 
we have not yet discovered. It may be all right in 
ordinary language to speak of the laws of gravitation 
and chemical affinity; of the properties of light and 
heat; of electricity, magnetism, and the X-rays — just 
as even astronomers speak of "sunrise" or "sunset." 
But the most exact and certain of all our "laws" may 
be only the crudest rule-of-thumb from a little higher 



52 Modem Christianity and Modem Science. 

standpoint. For we know that for almost every law 
yet discovered in physics or chemistry — the most ex- 
act of the sciences — some startling and mysterious 
exception has also been found, reminding us of the 
pitiful limits of our knowledge. And every fresh dis- 
covery only tends to render more probable or more 
certain the fact that all the forces of nature are but 
different manifestations of one tireless Energy, whom 
we Christians love to speak of as our Father. 

But before closing this chapter and passing on to 
the more definite examination of the theory of evo- 
lution, we must glance at two or three ordinary phe- 
nomena in illustration of what I have been saying. 

I wish not to forestall the consideration of the 
nebular hypothesis; but my first example will be 
taken from our solar system. With all our marvelous 
instruments, a real knowledge of our own system, to 
say nothing of the universe in general, is coming in 
but slowly. Men long ago noticed so many similar 
movements in the members of our sun and his fam- 
ily as to indicate that they were evidently of one ori- 
gin. The sun and his attending globes, both planets 
and satellites, rotate from west to east, and the plan- 
ets, with their satellites, revolve about the sun in the 
same direction. But there are striking exceptions. 
Among others, the moons of Uranus rotate from east 
to west, and revolve in planes nearly at right angles 
to their planet's orbit. Anything more contrary to 
the general arrangements of our system, to say noth- 
ing of the nebular theory, could not well be imagined 
on the part of these little fellows; yet it appears to 
create no confusion, but they all sweep onward in 
their courses with rhythmic swing, and nightly dis- 



Divine Immanence. 53 

course upon the puerility of man's guesses as to their 
origin, or even the real laws under which they are 
now running. A boy living near a railway track 
might, with a little observation, be able to say that at 
a certain hour an express or a freight would be sure 
to pass. But every now and then a "special," like 
one of our "tramp" comets or meteoroids, sweeps 
past, and shows how little he knows of the plans and 
arrangements at the head office. 

Or let us look at the truly wonderful way in which 
water acts in its expansion and contraction. It is an 
all but universal rule in nature that every substance, 
solid, liquid, or gas, expands with the heat and con- 
tracts with its absence, the result being that solids 
always sink in their own liquids. In a lecture de- 
livered before the Royal Institution in London, as 
long ago as 1867, Dr. Sterry Hunt used this fact to 
prove that the ordinary notion of a heated liquid in- 
terior for our globe is absolute nonsense. But ice, 
on the contrary, does not act thus. In the liquid 
state it (water) contracts with the cold till it reaches 
4 degrees C, which is its most condensed state. It 
then begins to expand with the cold, 9 till it reaches 



9 1 know that water is not entirely alone in this curious action. 
Some of the common oils, I believe, act similarly; also iron, 
antimony, and others among the metals. Silicon also has lately 
been found to expand almost uniformly up to 1400 C, when 
it begins to contract with further heat, and reverses the whole 
process when cooling. Theoretically many substances may do this 
at extreme temperatures. But has any torturing ol the Kinetic 
theory of the molecules been able to wring from it an explanation 
of these phenomena? It has long been evident that these vol- 
uminous theories about atoms, molecules, and ether, are but 
learned masks for our ignorance of real nature, perhaps I should 



54 Modern Christianity and Modern Science. 

zero C, when it becomes solid (ice), and after that 
follows the usual law of expansion and contraction. 
But., as Thos. Edison remarked, it is a lucky thing for 
us poor mortals that ice is thus an exception to the 
general rule. For if it occupied less space in the solid 
than in the liquid state, as most substances do, it 
would sink in water as fast as it formed, with results 
too awful to contemplate; for our lakes and rivers 
would freeze solid in the first months of winter, and 
all the summer could possibly do would be to thaw 
them out a little on top. The scientist may believe 
any sort of kinetic theory he likes about it, but it is 
not difficult for me to believe that, through some 
higher law, which we may or may not discover in the 
future, the Lord every winter's day makes in the case 
of ice an exception to His general rule, so that this 
world may be inhabited. 

Then there is that still unsolved problem of how 
light is transmitted to us from the sun or the im- 
measurably distant stars. It was one of many simi- 
lar problems propounded by the Almighty to the 
afflicted Job, to show him that human suffering is 
not by any means the only unexplained phenomenon 
of nature. "By what way is the light parted (or dis- 
tributed)?" was the problem presented to the patri- 
arch; and this age-old question is still unsolved. 
The modern theories of the ether, with its waves or 



rather say makeshifts to avoid the constantly accumulating 
evidence of the immediate action of Deity in every phenomenon 
of nature. I understand that in some of the more recent text- 
books on chemistry, particularly the German ones, e. g. y Os- 
wald's recently issued "Inorganic Chemistry," atoms and mol- 
ecules are conspicuously absent 



Divine Immanence. 55 

oscillations, may serve to allay the questions of the 
awakening youthful mind, eager to peep into the 
mysterious depths of God's creation, but in the last 
analysis it leaves God's question just as He asked 
it, and assists us in no way whatever to understand 
how the phenomena are really produced. By the 
theory of the ether, the problems are not solved, 
only postponed. The various phenomena of nature 
inevitably tend to produce in the unsophisticated 
mind the thought of an Intelligence behind nature 
as their immediate and active cause. This, we have 
seen, is the uniform teaching of the Bible. But 
scientists will insist on presenting a physical cause. 
We try their theory, but in this case, at least, instead 
of one mystery it raises a dozen. How then are we 
better off than before? The theory that light, 
radiant heat, gravity, etc., are transmitted by waves 
or oscillations in the ether, a rare elastic medium per- 
vading all space, even the interior of solid bodies, is 
what they are pleased to call a "thought-economizing 
device." This it certainly is, for it serves admirably 
to keep us from thinking about God as ever present 
in nature, and from reading the open lessons of His 
loving care in the daily phenomena of life. Rather 
let us call it a God- forgetting device, for it seems to 
me to be only a materialistic substitute for the Spirit 
or Power of God; and I, for one, am not willing to 
worship it in His place. 

If it served any useful purpose whatever in the 
scientific business of life, or in the thousand-and-one 
questions that we daily ask nature in our labora- 
tories by our experiments, it would be different. 



5 6 Modern Christianity and Modern Science. 

But I can not see that it does so. It may have 
assisted in enabling us to see the rhythmic regularity 
in which the radiant forces act, but the laws of their 
acting are readily handled and equated by mathe- 
matical formulae, and so the conception of the ether 
as a material entity, having all the other properties 
of matter except weight, as Lord Kelvin says, is per- 
fectly useless. I am not aware that it serves any 
purpose whatever in actual experiment not served 
equally well by mathematical formulae. It seems of 
use only in the vain imaginings of the nebular hy- 
pothesis concerning the origin of our world, a point 
to be dealt with in our next chapter. 

I can not present the utter inadequacy of the 
theory to explain the facts better than in the words 
of my friend, Dr. L. A. Reed: — 

"A necessary part of the ether hypothesis is that 
the ether is imponderable; i. e., has no weight, for 
if it had weight, it would fall in the direction of the 
strongest attracting force, and thus cease to be a 
uniform medium everywhere present. Being im- 
ponderable, or without weight, we are shut up to 
the conclusion that the ratio between the inter- 
spaces of these atoms and the atoms themselves is 
vastly greater than the like ratio in ordinary, or 
ponderable, matter. To put it plainly, the atoms of 
the ether, in order to fit out the theory, are as small 
with reference to the spaces between them as the 
sun and earth are compared with the space between 
them. And between these atoms there is absolutely 
vacant space. Therefore we have abandoned the 
first difficulty of how the force passes from the sun 



Divine Immanence. 57 

across the interspace to the earth, only to come to 
a second just like it — how does the force pass from 
one atom of the ether to another atom through the 
vacant space which always exists between them?" 

After showing how the theory of the construction 
of the ether is that it is composed of atoms which 
are never in contact, but with vast gulfs between 
them, he asks how this force (light or radiant 
energy) "in passing through the ether, moves from 
one of these atoms to the other." 

"With our ether hypothesis, we are no better off 
than we were before. We still have to imagine a 
body as acting where it is not, and in the absence of 
anything by which its action may be transferred. 
It makes no difference with the philosophy of the 
thing whether the exercise of force be on a large or 
small scale. In the words of Herbert Spencer, "We 
see . . . that the exercise of force is altogether 
unintelligible. We can not imagine it except 
through the instrumentality of something having 
extension; and yet, when we have assumed this 
something, we find that the perplexity is not got rid 
of, but only postponed. We are obliged to con- 
clude that matter, whether ponderable or imponder- 
able, and whether aggregated or in its hypothetical 
units, acts upon matter through absolutely vacant 
space; and yet this conclusion is positively unthink- 
able." 10 

It thus seems perfectly evident that, like many 
other modern theories, this of the ether is only an 
effort to postpone from our thoughts the real lessons 

20 "The Scriptural Foundation of Science,'* pp. 90-95, 1901. 



53 Modern Christianity and Modem Science. 

of phenomena, to push the real Cause back one step 
further, — a last, desperate effort, in face of the con- 
stantly accumulating evidence of modern times, that 
the Great First Cause is far more intimately con- 
nected with life and motion than many are willing 
to believe. Since it only explains the unknown in 
terms of the unknown, it can only act as a sort of 
buffer or shield between us and the conception of 
the Divine Immanence. But if for this dead, ma- 
terialistic ether we substitute an omnipresent spirit- 
ual Intelligence, the phenomena are at least intelli- 
gible; while to me they are intelligible in no other 
way. 

"There lives and works 
A soul in all things, and that soul is God." 

Thus wrote one of the truest of poets over a cen- 
tury ago; and those of us who love the God of 
nature are onfy cheered and encouraged in our 
expectant hope by every modern discovery of science 
that opens up some fresh vista in the tireless min- 
istrations of Him who not only "called light out of 
darkness," but who said, "I am the light of the 
world." John 8:12. 

But among the wonders of nature, nothing, per- 
haps, is more remarkable — nothing seems so to usher 
us into the very workshop of the Creator — as when 
beneath the microscope we study the action of the 
cell, with its component protoplasm. Huxley called 
the latter the "physical basis of life," because it is 
the same in both plants and animals, and is the basis 
of all organized existence. Speaking of the proto- 
plasm of plants and animals, we have the following, 
from good authority: — 



Divine Immanence. 59 

"We can not distinguish the two by any chemical 
or physical tests, and can only say that, taken as a 
whole, the protoplasm of plants differs from that of 
animals in its secretions." 11 

This only means that the one does a different work 
from the other. Yes, and how different! The cells 
of all life exhibit such a division of labor, and move 
so rhythmically about their several duties, that, as we 
watch them under the microscope, — there are five 
millions of them in one drop of our blood, — we can 
almost hear the great Captain of nature issuing His 
orders to them. It is preposterous for any one to 
tell us that their regular, soldier-like movements are 
the result of properties residing in their elements; 
though, even then, the question would come up as 
before, — Whence these marvelous properties? But 
look at this speck in one of our fingers; it is building 
up bone. Another speck, its brother, nay, its exact 
double, in our brain, is building up brain tissue. Or 
look at these marvelous little creatures that we call 
the white blood-corpuscles, as they travel here and 
there, ferreting out, and, in their self-sacrificing way, 
swallowing the poisons they find in the various parts 
of the body. And yet these masses of protoplasm 
never get confused or do the wrong kind of work, 
unless, perchance, we violate the laws of our bodies 
and give them too much to do, loading them down 
with poisons that they try in frantic haste to elim- 
inate. The various cells may then get confused as to 
duty and do the wrong kind of work, building up 
fatty matter in place of muscle or depositing bony 



11 C. E. Bessey, Botany, p. i. 



60 Modern Christianity and Modern Science. 

matter between our joints, when we then say that 
we have rheumatism. But as long as we work in 
harmony with God's purposes concerning our being, 
He guides these little fellows in their wonderful divi- 
sion of labor, and they do not get confused, but al- 
ways do the part assigned them faithfully and well. 
These cells have all the appearance of being mere au- 
tomata beneath the immediate control of some mas- 
ter Mind. 12 

I can not do better than give here the latest thing 
that has come to hand. In reviewing an elaborate 
work by Professor His, a well-known biologist of 
Germany, the editor of Nature has occasion to speak 
of the growth of the embryo, and says : — 

"How T is it that certain structures arise at certain, 
usually predestined, times in particular places, and 
only there, and out of certain cells alone? The 
simplest answer, and that long made the basis of al- 
most all embryological research, has been that out of 
three primary layers of cells the embryo and all its 
parts take their origin. The working out of the de- 
tails has largely been the labor of embryological in- 
vestigation of the past fifty years. •. . . We still 
do not know why a certain cell becomes a gland-cell, 
another a ganglion-cell; why one cell gives rise to a 
smooth muscle-Hber, while a neighbor forms volun- 
tary muscle. . . . 

12 Perhaps even a better example of this would be the "Protista," 
or lowest forms of life, and intermediate between plants and ani- 
mals, which, though "utterly destitute of even a rudimentary trace 
of a cerebral or neurological organ," are yet declared to exhibit 
"intelligent movements" beneath the microscope. See a learned 
article by Hermann Wettstein in the Boston Investigator., Decem- 
ber 14, 1901. 



Divine Immanence. bi 

"It would appear to be quite possible that num- 
bers of embryological problems incapable of any fun* 
damental solution may exist. The range of human 
mental vision may have been reached with the limi- 
tations of microscopic lenses. However that may be, 
it is daily becoming more apparent that epigenesis 
with the three layers of the germ furnishes no explana- 
tion of developmental phenomena/' 13 

The Darwinian argument from the embryological 
development will be taken up in its proper place. It 
has provided some of the most common arguments, 
real or imaginary, of such men as Huxley, Spencer, 
and Haeckel. But it seems to me to furnish one of the 
strongest proofs of the Divine Immanence, and that 
perfectly independent of the question whether man 
has descended from the lower forms of life or not. 
As my friend, Prof. J. A. L. Derby, very pertinently 
remarks : — 

"The nearer the human embryo approaches that 
of a rabbit or dog, composed of masses of identical 
protoplasm similarly arranged, as it undoubtedly is, 
the clearer the demonstration that only some directing 
Power behind its growth keeps it from developing 
into a rabbit or dog instead of into a child, and the 
more clearly we understand what God meant when 
He commanded each living form to produce 'after 
his kind/ " 

According to Darwin's own theory of "pangene- 
sis," representative gemmules from all the various 
tissues of the parent's body are present in the germ 
cells, and therefore in the offspring develop into 

13 Nature, May 23, 1901, pp. 75, 76 (Italics mine). 



62 Modern Christianity and Modern Science. 

corresponding tissues. This looks plausible enough 
at first; but the facts of atavism, the transmission of 
well-developed arms or legs that the parent may have 
lost years ago, as well as the now generally acknowl- 
edged fact that acquired characteristics are not trans- 
mitted, have all so told against this theory that it 
would not be putting the case too strongly to say 
that most biologists have abandoned it. But of the 
numerous theories substituted, none that I know of 
seem willing to face the fact that the component parts 
of germ-cells may be exactly similar to one another 
in reality, and that only what I may call a continuity 
of germ responsibility serves to insure the reproduc- 
tion of the structural traits of the parent. If both you 
and I meet a starving man on the street, it may not 
make a particle of difference, as far as the kind of food 
goes, which of us gives him a meal at the nearest res- 
taurant, or which refuses. But our individual actions 
decide as to which gets his thanks, and whose moral 
or religious ideas he will respect, perhaps imitate. 
Or, on the other hand, it may make no difference in 
the pain of the blozv which of us gives him a kick 
or which does not; but it would certainly result in 
deciding as to which of us is to be followed by his 
imprecations, and about which of us he can never 
hereafter believe anything good. Just so it seems 
to me that God may have ordained that, though dif- 
ferent germ-cells be all structurally alike, each shall 
develop only into structures and characters similar 
to its parents. Surely this is infinitely more reason- 
able than Haeckel's idea that, like men in a com- 
munity, the various cells of the embryo enter into 



Divine Immanence. 63 

a kind of mutual-benefit arrangement, and fix on a 
division of labor among themselves for the good of 
the whole, which seems little short of deifying the 
atoms and molecules. Another scientist, who ought 
surely to have the best light that is available to-day 
from the standpoint of the philosophy founded by 
his father, remarks of similar phenomena that indi- 
viduals develop as they do because they "are the suc- 
cessful ones who have inherited from successful 
ancestors" 14 the power of developing in this manner, 
which, of course, is no explanation at all. 

Let me here give a quotation from Le Conte, 
which, of course, is only an imaginary case, for we 
can not watch the embryo develop under our eyes; 
but it may be taken as a truthful statement of the 
facts as gleaned through all these years, from Von 
Baer to the present time : — 

" Suppose, then, we have one thousand eggs, rep- 
resenting all the different departments, classes, orders, 
families, etc., of animals. Many of these may doubt- 
less be identified by form or size, or some other super- 
ficial character, as the eggs of this or that animal, 
but structurally they are all alike. At first, i. e., as 
germ-cells, they all represent the earliest (?) condi- 
tion of life on the earth, and the lowest forms of life 
now. If we now watch their development, we find 
that some remain in this first condition without 
further change. These we set aside. They are 
protozoa. The remainder continue to develop, but 
at first it would be impossible to say to which of the 

l4 Francis Darwin, before the British Association, Glasgow, Sept. 
16, 1901, and reported in Nature, Nov. 14, 1901, p. 43. 



64 Modern Christianity and Modern Science. 

several departments or primary groups they each be- 
longed. Then, by cell-multiplication, the original 
single cell becomes a cell-aggregate. It may be com- 
pared now to a compound protozoan, such as for- 
aminifera. The cell-aggregate then differentiates into 
layers, and forms, in fact, a two-layered sack, called 
a gastrula. This is the structure of some of the low- 
est ccelentrates, such as the hydra. Thus far all 
seem to go together. But now, for the first time, 
the primary groups are declared. If it be a verte- 
brate, for example, the most fundamental charac- 
ters, — the cerebro-spinal axis, the vertebral column, 
and the double cavity, neural and visceral, — are out- 
lined. Suppose, now, we set aside all other depart- 
ments, and fix our attention on the vertebrates. At 
first we could not tell which were mammals, birds, 
reptiles, or fishes; but after a while the classes are 
declared. We now set aside all other classes and 
watch the mammals. After a while the order de- 
clares itself. We select the ungulates. Then the 
family is declared, say the Equidae; then the genus, 
Equus; and, lastly, the species, Caballus" 15 

Surely Professor Derby spoke truly when he said 
that such things give unmistakable evidence of an 
ever-present Intelligence; and that the nearer the hu- 
man embryo approaches that of one of the lower 
animals, the clearer is the demonstration that only 
some directing Power behind its growth keeps it from 
developing into one of these forms instead of into a 
child. 



15 "Evolution and Religious Thought," pp. 176, 177. I give 
italics as I find them. 



Divine Immanence. 65 

Thus, then, I may conclude my argument. I have 
not intended to rely upon any of the mere mysteries 
of nature, per se, as furnishing any proof of the con- 
scious, intelligent character of the Force present be- 
hind phenomena, though to me personally some of the 
problems connected with heat and light are of such a 
nature that they seem intelligible in no other way. 
However, design is manifest through inorganic nature 
in a thousand ways, and, as Dugald Stewart has said, 
"Every combination of means to an end implies in- 
telligence." But the marvelous action of the cells 
or component units of all organisms is of a much 
higher nature, for they have all the seeming of mere 
automata under the direct control of an intelligent, 
purpose-filled Mind, which, as the correlation of 
forces teaches us, must be identical with the energy 
pervading all nature, whose work in various ways 
we know as light, heat, gravity, electricity, etc. Or, 
let me try to sum up the whole thing in a single sen- 
tence: Nature in a thousand ways gives us unmis- 
takable evidences of design, and therefore of an Intel- 
ligent Power behind phenomena; moreover, the 
protoplasmic units of the developing or mature organ- 
ism have all the appearance of being mere automata 
beneath the immediate action of this Intelligent 
Power; but the vital power or force working in every 
organism being capable of exact correlation with all 
other forces, such as heat, light, gravity, electricity, 
etc., the immanence or immediate action of this 
Power in all the phenomena of nature is demonstrated 
beyond a doubt. 

In the modern light of the marvelous construction 
5 



66 Modern Christianity and Modern Science. 

of our universe, with such countless evidences of de- 
sign and of adaptation of means to an end, let no 
one tell us that such things are not the direct work 
of a supreme Mind, but that all these wonderful mu- 
tual adaptations are merely the properties of matter! 
Such a notion makes too perpetual a draft on our 
credulity, and the idea of the direct action of a su- 
preme, intelligent Will is too much in the nature 
of a simplifying thought for us to abandon the beau- 
tiful view presented in the Sacred Scriptures: "These 
wait all upon Thee. . . . That Thou givest them 
they gather; Thou openest Thine hand, they are filled 
with good." From protoplasm to man, from atom 
to starry system and illimitable space, all things are 
moment by moment dependent upon the sleepless 
energy of the great Creator of all. 

True, the natural human heart can not bear this 
thought. It brings us too close beneath His gaze in 
our spiritual shortcoming and nakedness. Sinful 
men will not live and work thus beneath the very eye 
of the Infinite. And so they draw the veil of their 
scientific materialism over their hearts to hide them 
from His all-searching gaze. In ancient times they 
did the same; and the marvelous knowledge of na- 
ture which they had in the morning of our world de- 
generated into the nature worship which we find at 
the first dawn of secular history. It is only the Chris- 
tian who dares face the fact that the common forces 
spoken of as light, heat, gravity, etc., are not the 
real causes of phenomena. He alone delights to look 
upon the unveiled majesty of the Creator in His cease- 
less service of love, perpetually ministering to the 



Divine Immanence. 67 

needs and even the whims of His creatures; and if it 
reminds the believer of his own spiritual nakedness 
and insular selfishness, it serves also to perpetually 
remind him that it is only the bestowed righteousness 
of Christ that can clothe the ashamed soul beneath 
the eye of Infinite Purity and Unselfish Love. But 
this is amply sufficient. That garment was woven 
in the loom of heaven, beneath the eye of the Mas- 
ter of design, and it will always avail the shivering 
sinner if he will take it now, while it is freely offered, 
like all the other gifts of nature's God, "without 
money and without price." 



CHAPTER III. 

Scientific World- Building, 

Our objections to the now fashionable doctrine of 
evolution, especially that last division of the subject, 
or the last stage in the process, called Darwinism, are 
mainly philosophical and moral. From these stand- 
points we shall endeavor to show, in a subsequent 
chapter, that the doctrine of man's development from 
the lower animal forms through untold ages of sur- 
vival of the fittest is contrary alike to the fatherhood 
of God and man's moral accountability for sin; 
and that the idea that a ceaseless struggle for ex- 
istence and survival at the expense of others is the 
normal and not an abnormal condition of society 
and creation in general, has, in the words of the 
late Sir William Dawson, "stimulated to an intense 
degree that popular unrest so natural to an age dis- 
contented with its lot, . . . and which threatens 
to overthrow the whole fabric of society as at present 
constituted." 1 The supreme test of a doctrine ought 
to be its effect on life and action. Weighed in this 
balance, the Darwinian origin of man is certainly 
most sadly wanting. 

But in considering the evolution theory as a 
whole — "from mud to mind," from the nebula to the 
Sermon on the Mount, for it is just this. — our first 

1 " Modern Ideas of Evolution," 1891, p. 12. 
(68) 



Scientific World-Building. 69 

work must be with the scientific aspects 01 its first 
stages. Quite a popular writer on the subject has 
told us: "If the theory of Evolution be not uni- 
versal, the germs of decay are in it." 2 Hence, we 
shall take it up in historical order and give an out- 
line of some ordinary familiar facts which show that 
the theory is, to say the least, not proven. Or, as 
all our ideas of origins must, from the scientific stand- 
point, rest upon rational probabilities, not mathe- 
matical demonstration, we shall undertake to show 
that the whole scheme of evolution, from beginning 
to end, is in the highest degree improbable and ab- 
surd. 

Every modern scheme of evolution starts, of 
course, with matter distributed more or less evenly 
through space, and then, by contraction and conden- 
sation, endeavors to shape our world and solar sys- 
tem from this nebulous cloud of diffused matter. But 
the theory is as nebulous and hazy as the materials 
it deals with, so that we can not properly speak of 
the nebular theory unless we qualify it with some 
proper name, as that of Kant, Laplace, Spencer, or 
Lockyer, as the case may be. Each one of these, 
with other less famous names that might be men- 
tioned, has seen some of the absurdities of his pred- 
ecessors, but could not resist the temptation to try 
his hand, at world-building, and thus establish the 
first stage in the process of universal evolution. 

There being so many forms of the theory, I shall 
endeavor to confine myself to objections that have 
weight against them all; for, though so diverse in 

2 "The Story of Creation," p. 9, by Prof. Edw. Clodd, F. R. S. 



70 Modern Christianity and Modem Science. 

methods and processes, they have many points in 
common. They all start with diffused matter, begin 
to contract it by gravitation, develop a rotary motion 
in the parts by the collision of the particles with one 
another, and all end with our world a cooling globe, 
with its interior still a heated, perhaps liquid, mass. 
Accordingly our consideration of the subject must be 
largely confined to those points of the process that 
are more or less common to the various forms of the 
theory. 

Of course, none of the world-builders mentioned 
above ever tried to account for the origin of their 
diffused nebulous cloud. But diffused matter as 
much needs accounting for as agglomerated matter. 
And especially if, in that far-off time, its particles con- 
tained in themselves, as Tyndall says, "the promise 
and potency of all terrestrial life," what gave to mat- 
ter these marvelous powers of orderly arrangement, 
and capacities for the beautiful constructions and 
wonderful adaptations that we everywhere behold? 
How can we think of law save as the work of mind? 
How think of the plan of our universe as an inven- 
tion except as the work of a Supreme Intellect, infinite 
and eternal? We are degrading our mental powers 
by prostituting them to an}^ such pantheistic adora- 
tion of atoms and molecules. 3 



3 It ought to be evident to all that we must either accept the 
doctrine of the Divine Immanence in all its fulness or adopt the 
following language of Professor Haeckel, in his latest work, "The 
Riddle of the Universe:" "Matter and ether are not dead, and 
only moved by extrinsic force; but they are endowed with sensa- 
tion and will; they experience an inclination for condensation, a 
dislike for strain; they strive after the one, and struggle against 



Scientific World-Building, 71 

But even if they have their cloud of diffused mat- 
ter ready made, it must be strictly limited in extent, 
or else it would never set up attraction toward a cen- 
ter, for there would be no center. An infinite uni- 
verse full of matter would never aggregate. But 
how came this part of space to be full and other parts 
empty? Also, if matter is eternal, as they all declare, 
it only makes the case worse for them. If matter 
be eternal, how came it to be diffused through space, 
if its natural tendency is to come together into bodies 
like the planets or the sun — if the homogeneous is 
eternally unstable, as Spencer says, and always tend- 
ing toward the heterogeneous? What reason can we 
imagine for the molecules being primarily separate? 
Or, after staying in this diffused state, asleep from 
all eternity, what made them wake up and start on 
their never-ending journey toward one another? 
Were they getting lonesome? Did one little fellow 
start first and all the others follow like sheep, or did 
they all wake up and start together at the same time? 
I do not like to appear trivial, but questions like 
these show the extreme fanciful nature of their 
theories. 

Of course, they do not attempt to account for 
either the origin of matter or the beginnings of mo- 
tion, any more than they now pretend to account 
for life since Pasteur gave spontaneous generation its 
quietus. They tell us that such things are unknown 



the other." — Page 380. But if this be not pantheism, or the dei- 
fication of matter, what is it? No wonder the president of the 
British Association, before the recent meeting at Glasgow, speaks 
of it as an "unproved assertion." 



72 Modern Christianity and Modern Science. 

and unknowable. We can not even tell the real rea- 
son for such a universal thing as gravitation. We 
can only describe how it acts. Science never con- 
ducts us to primary causes; in thousands of cases, 
not even to secondary ones. But this, as I have al- 
ready shown, only shows the limits of the scientific 
method, for science as such only deals with phenom- 
ena and the things of time and sense, and thus can 
never to any philosophic mind demonstrate the ma- 
terialistic notion of the universe. The question of 
real origins and ultimate causes belongs to philos- 
ophy and not to science, and philosophy revolts at 
the idea of matter being the real cause of anything, 
and assures us that there is an infinite Mind as the 
first cause of all. 

Out of the numerous forms of the nebular theory 
some, like La Place, start the universe hot — a vast 
fire-mist — and condense it in the cooling; some, like 
Spencer, start it cold and condense it in the heating, 
or, perhaps I should say, heat it in the condensing. 
But surely this last error is worse than the first, for 
it is contrary to all analogy and experience. No such 
process as the condensing of solid bodies out of flam- 
ing gases has ever been actually seen by man in either 
heaven or earth. As one writer tersely expresses it: 
"Nobody ever expects to see the burning of gas re- 
sult in coal; the process of gas-making is not one of 
condensation, but the reverse, — the conversion of 
solid bodies into gases. We know of no other way 
in which a continuous flame can be produced than 
by the combustion of some solid or liquid fuel 



"4 



* Robert Patterson, "Errors of Evolution," p. 30. 



Scientific World-Building. 73 

Even the combustion of hydrogen is not a process 
of condensation, but of diffusion. Nor has the spec- 
troscope ever shown us any vaporized mundane ele- 
ments except where they are now under the action 
of intense heat. It is hard enough for us to liquefy 
such substances as iron, calcium, and silicon, but in 
the intense heat of the sun they exist as vapor or gas. 
In fact, we know of no force in nature capable of 
maintaining the water, metals, and other solids of our 
globe in the form of vapor save intense heat. Even 
the gases of our atmosphere have been converted into 
solids by cold, so that the idea of a nebulous fluid at 
the absolute zero is a gross contradiction of terms. 
It seems even more absurd than La Place's fire-mist. 
But the homogeneousness 5 of the original matter 
is equally absurd, though absolutely essential to their 
theory. Has the chemistry of the heavens tended 
in any way to encourage the idea that the elements 
as we know them are but allotropic forms of one 
primal element? Has the spectroscope ever shown 
us any such homogeneous matter in space? They 



5 Of course, I am here speaking only of matter from the stand- 
point of natural science — not philosophy. The latter may teach us, 
as already intimated, that God did not create what we call matter 
from absolutely nothing, but from preexisting spiritual substance. 
In this sense, then, matter did have a "homogeneous" origin. 
But such speculation is far beyond natural science, and beyond 
my purpose here. If science has demonstrated anything at all, it 
is that such elements as iron, oxygen, and carbon are material 
entities^ and maintain their individuality intact throughout our 
whole cosmos, even in the far-distant stars and nebulae. Hence 
natural science knows nothing of their hypothetical homogeneous 
matter. 



74 Modern Christianity and Modern Science. 

have found numerous examples of diffused gaseous 
matter, glowing with intense heat, but always com- 
posed of some of our own mundane elements, such 
as nitrogen, hydrogen, barium, iron, etc. When 
captured, the rays of light, like the messengers of 
God that they really are, always tell the truth. And 
no sun, or star, or nebulous matter has ever yet been 
found containing only one simple, uncompounded 
element; while these existing masses of nebulous 
matter, like the persistent types of the geologists, are 
without explanation if matter has since all eternity 
been condensing into systems or worlds. 

But the original oneness or homogeneousness of 
matter lies at the very foundation of the modern ma- 
terialistic evolution of Haeckel, Spencer, and their 
followers, though I believe the theistic evolutionists 
do not bother their heads about the matter. Of 
course, common sense refuses to believe in the eter- 
nity of compound or combined substances. We in- 
stinctively say that the elements must precede the 
combination. But of the seventy odd elements that 
compose our cosmos, no two are alike. Each has 
"properties" entirely different from every other, and 
utterly antagonistic to many others. Many of them 
are so prone to combine that we can not keep them 
separate with all our skill. Chemists have hard work 
to keep any gas absolutely pure for half an hour in 
any vessel they can devise. But why should we be 
asked to believe in a primal condition of matter of 
which w r e are not only without example in nature, 
but which we can not even conceive to be possible? — 
Only because of the determination to dispense as 



Scientific World-Building. 7$ 

much as possible with the Creator and the great Or- 
ganizer and Combiner of these elements into the 
world as we find it. 

But suppose we give these world-builders a great 
nebulous mass of homogeneous matter — composed 
of only one element — what could they do with it 
according to the laws of physics and chemistry? 
What could they produce from such a mass? — Cer- 
tainly nothing but physical or mechanical change-— 
no chemical or organic change whatever. The law 
of gravitation might be persuaded to set up contrac- 
tion for them, and, if assisted by polarity, might even 
produce heat or electricity, though contraction and 
heat are exact opposites; but not even thus can we 
imagine any chemical action or reaction whatever, 
to say nothing of the spontaneous generation of life. 
They might work it up into any shape they liked, 
into globes, cubes, or flat discs; they might even set 
up convoluted vortex rings throughout the whole 
mass; but by no other process than that of adding 
another and different substance to it, could they, by 
any law of physics or chemistry, produce from it a 
single compound substance. They could never get 
out of it what was not in it. No action or reaction 
is possible between the atoms of the same substance 
or even the allotropic forms of the same substance; 
and no chemical change could possibly occur until 
some other element was introduced from the outside. 

But, as James Clerk Maxwell eloquently de- 
clares : — 

"No theory of evolution can be formed to account 
for the similarity of molecules [atoms], for evolution 



7& Modern Christianity and Modem Science. 

necessarily implies continuous change, and the mol- 
ecule is incapable of growth or decay, of generation 
or destruction. None of the processes of nature, 
since the time when nature began, have produced 
the slightest difference in the properties of any mol- 
ecule. We are therefore unable to ascribe either the 
existence of the molecules or the identity of their 
properties to the operation of any of the causes 
which we call natural. On the other hand, the exaci 
equality of each molecule to all others of the same 
kind gives it, as Sir John Herschel has well said, the 
essential character of a . manufactured article, and 
precludes the idea of its being eternal and self- 
existent. . . . 

"But though in the course of ages catastrophies 
have occurred, and may yet occur, in the heavens, 
though ancient systems may be dissolved and new 
systems evolved out of their ruins, the molecules 
[atoms] out of which these systems are built — the 
foundation stones of the material universe — remain 
unbroken and unworn. They continue this day as 
they were created, perfect in number, and measure, 
and weight, and from the ineffaceable character im- 
pressed on them we may learn that those aspirations 
after accuracy in measurement, truth in statement, 
and justice in action, which we reckon among our 
noblest attributes as men, are ours because they are 
essentially constituents of the image of Him who in 
the beginning created not only the heaven and the 
earth, but the materials of which heaven and earth 
consist/' 6 



6 Address before the British Association, August, 1873. 



Scientific World-Building. 77 

We shall now endeavor to give some of the minor- 
puzzles and inconsistencies of the theory in the me- 
chanical arrangements of our solar system. 

But let us first have a definition of the nebular the- 
ory as generally understood. I quote from "Popular 
Astronomy/'' by Camille Flammarion, translated by 
J. E. Gore, and published by D. Appleton & Co.: — 

"Well, the most probable hypothesis, the most sci- 
entific theory, is that which represents the sun as a 
condensed nebula. This carries us back to an un- 
known epoch, when this nebula occupied the present 
place of the solar system, and even more, an im- 
mense lens-shaped mass of gas turning slowly on 
itself, and having its exterior circumference in the 
zone which makes the orbit of Neptune, or further 
still, for Neptune does not form the true limit of the 
system. Let us imagine, then, an immense gaseous 
mass placed in space. Attraction is a force inherent 
in every atom of matter. The denser portion of this 
mass will insensibly attract toward it the other parts, 
and, in the slow fall of the more distant molecules 
toward this more attractive region, a general motion 
is produced, incompletely directed toward this center, 
and soon involving the whole mass in the same mo- 
tion of rotation." 

He then proceeds: "The laws of mechanics show 
that, as this gaseous mass condenses and shrinks, the 
motion of the rotation of the nebula is accelerated. 
In turning, it becomes flattened at the poles, and 
gradually takes the form of an immense, lens-shaped 
mass of gas. It has begun to turn so quickly as to 
develop, at the exterior circumference, a centrifugal 



7 8 Modern Christianity and Modern Science. 

force superior to the general attraction of the mass, 
as when we whirl a sling; the inevitable consequence 
of this excess is a rupture of the equilibrium, which 
detaches an external ring. This gaseous ring will 
continue to rotate in the same time and with the 
same velocity; but the nebulous matter will be hence- 
forth detached, and will continue to undergo pro- 
gressive condensation and acceleration of motion. 
The same feat will be reproduced as often as the 
velocity of rotation surpasses that by which the cen- 
trifugal force remains inferior to the attraction. It 
may have happened, also, that secondary centers of 
condensation would be formed, even in the interior 
of the nebula." 7 

Let us now in imagination take our stand at some 
point in space where we can watch this great mother 
nebula as it gives birth to the planet Neptune, its first- 
born. As this planet is now 2,790,000,000 miles 
from our present sun, the great mother must at this 
time have been considerably over 5,000,000,000 
miles in diameter. But, contrary to mammalian 
parturition, this outer ring must have opened this 
5,000,000,000 miles for the parent body to squeeze 
through. Tt is difficult to see how the particles of 
the young planet could get together again after being 
spread out over this immense area. One would 
think that the parental affection of gravitation would 



7 Page 72, et seq. (Italics supplied). For many of the arguments 
here given in refutation of this statement of the nebular theory, I 
am indebted to a suggestive work, "The Earth and the World, 
How Formed?" By A. G. Jennings, Flemming H. Revell Co., 
1900. 



Scientific World-Building. 



79 



have a thousand times more power to draw these de- 
tached pieces of a ring back again to itself than these 
scattered fragments of the new-born ring would have 
of getting together so as to form one compact body. 




Diagram of Our Solar System. 



But then, I suppose, the instincts of a new-born 
planet must be equally marvelous with those of ter- 
restrial animals. 

After untold ages of watching and waiting, while 



80 Modern Christianity and Modem Science. 

the rotating mass was condensing and contracting 
down to the limits of the present orbit of Uranus, 
which is about one billion miles nearer the sun than 
Neptune, this second of the planets is delivered. 
We should expect, after this enormous shrinkage of 
over two billion miles in diameter, that Uranus 
ought to be a body vastly greater in size than it is. 
Astronomers, however, have long searched in vain 
for any other planet between it and Neptune. 

But it would never do to pass by the very schis- 
matic behavior of this planet's four little satellites, 
or moons — grandchildren of the old mother nebula. 
As everybody knows, the planets all revolve about 
the sun from w T est to east, and rotate on their axes 
in the same general direction. These four little fel- 
lows ought also to revolve about their parent in this 
direction; but, through some strange perversion of 
heredity, their rotation as we now find it is from east 
to west, while they revolve in planes nearly at right 
angles to their parent's orbit. Why they have not 
long since been disinherited for contempt of parental 
authority, the evolutionists have not informed us. 
But there they are, and there they have been, acting 
as if there were no such thing as a nebular theory 
to which they ought to conform. 

Then comes Saturn with its triple rings, the wonder 
of the heavens. As Saturn is about 900,000,000 
miles nearer the sun than Uranus, the mother nebula 
having contracted 1,800,000,000 miles in diameter 
since the birth of the last-named planet, we should 
confidently expect, in this case at least, a daughter 
(or son) of some proportionate size. On the con- 



Scientific World -Building. 8 1 

trary, its total mass is only about equal to that of 
our earth, while its lack of density, and the wonderful 
stability of its encircling rings, are equally puzzles for 
the theorists. 

But the next to be born of this heavenly family is 
indeed a child worthy of its parent — the mighty 
Jupiter, prince of the planets, in volume about 1,400 
times that of our earth, or more than that of all the 
other planets combined. But, as it is only about 
400,000,000 miles from Saturn, we can not under- 
stand why this comparatively small contraction 
should have produced a planet so much larger than 
the three preceding planets taken together, in the 
formation of which the nebula had contracted about 
4,000,000,000 miles. 

Its great speed of rotation also — rotating in less 
than 10 hours — gives its equator a velocity of 27,000 
miles an hour, or 27 times faster than our earth, and 
almost 7 times faster than the sun, the mother of 
us all. We must now call to mind that as Neptune, 
the first-born of the system, revolves about the sun in 
165 of our years, this must have been the original 
rotary motion of the nebula, which would, however, 
at that time give its circumference a velocity of about 
11,000 miles per hour. But if, while rotating at this 
rate, it threw off the mass of matter which we now 
call the planet Neptune, why does not Jupiter, going 
27,000 miles an hour at its circumference, or nearly 
two and a half times as fast, be even now throwing 
off rings at a rapid rate? It must have infinitely 
less gravitational force to keep its equator in subjec- 
tion, though the force of hereditary example alone, 



82 Modern Christianity and Modern Science. 

one would think, would make the task an extremely 
difficult one. 

After another vast break and enormous con- 
traction, during which a few hundred pieces, called 
asteroids, were given off, which, however, never 
seem to have had the slightest notion of combining 
together into one body, another planet, Mars, 8 is 
born of the now exhausted mother; but it is only a 
dwarf, being the smallest of the system, except 
Mercury. 

Then came our earth; then Venus and Mercury, 
the two interior planets. One curious thing about 
Venus and Mercury is that, as some astronomers 
declare, they both rotate on their axes only once 
while revolving about the sun, thus always pre- 
senting the same face to it. How they could ever 
have contracted this strange habit, when all their 
elders had set them such a different example, it is 
hard to tell. Surely they have not been doing any- 
thing to be ashamed of that they should continue 
to look their mother in the eye in this suspicious 
manner, though, if they have anything in common 
with the ancient Greek deities whose names they bear, 
we might well imagine sufficient reason. At any 
rate, how came the law governing centrifugal force 
to allow of Mercury, the last of the planets, being also 
the most dense of all, some say as heavy as lead, or 

8 The smaller of the two satellites of Mars, which were discov- 
ered by Professor Hall in 1877, presents another problem for the 
theorizers. It is, I believe, only about 6 or 7 miles in diameter, 
and distant from its planet about 4,000 miles (5,800, some say), 
but it flies around the latter more than three times while the 
planet is rotating once. 



Scientific World-Building. 8$ 

about twice as dense as any other body in our solar 
system ? 9 

Last of all we have the sun, which, according to 
the theory, is only the remains of the once mighty 
nebula, the "lank and all o'er-teemed" mother of us 
all. But how is it that it has so little density? I! 
Mercury, the last 10 planet given off, is a fair indication 
of its density or of its speed of rotation at that time 
when the rotating mass was 70,000,000 miles in di- 
ameter, with its rim passing through space 2,500,000 
miles per day, or 100,000 miles per hour, which is the 
present size of Mercury's orbit and its rate along it, 
why should the sun be, in weight, light out of all 
proportion even after contracting from 70,000,000 
miles down to less than 900,000? Why, moreover, 
should it have such a slow rotary motion, taking 
about twenty-five and one- fourth days to rotate on its 
axis, thus giving its equator a velocity of only about 
4,000 miles per hour, while Jupiter and Saturn move 
through space about six times as fast, and Mercury, 
the last of all, twenty-five times as fast? According 
to the theory, the rotary motion increased as the mass 
contracted, and hence we should expect to find the sun, 
the last result of this contraction, to be now turning 
at a frightful rate of speed, and to be, above all its 



9 That is, according to the laws relating to revolving bodies, 
"the heaviest parts of the material, if at liberty to change position, 
gravitate toward the outer edge of the revolving body." Hence, 
according to the theory, the substances composing Mercury, what- 
ever they are, should have been thrown off first, not last. 

10 I have omitted Vulcan, for, as Professor Newcomb says, "Its 
existence is not generally accepted by astronomers." 



84 Modern Christianity and Modern Science. 

children, flattened at its poles into almost the shape 
of a thin disc. On the contrary, its motion is com- 
paratively slow, and astronomers tell us that its polar 
and equatorial diameters are so nearly equal that ab- 
solutely no difference between them can be perceived, 
in short, that it is the most perfect sphere in the whole 
system. 

Some few years ago Mr. Grant Allen published a 
book entitled "Force and Energy," which professed 
to give a detailed statement of the whole philosophy 
of world-making. Many of the ideas had, of course, 
been advanced before, and are still held by some of 
the leading physicists of England. But in many re- 
spects it was quite original, and especially in profess- 
ing to give an exact and circumstantial account of 
the whole process, though, to do the author justice, 
Mr. Allen himself does not seem to have taken it very 
seriously. It has, however, been taken up and incor- 
porated by Prof. Edward Clodd in his popular account 
of Evolution. 11 which has had a wide circulation. 

In these books the reader will find it assumed that 
the ether — of which neither the authors, nor anybody 
else, know anything at all, not even its existence — is 
"relatively imponderable," though "capable of re- 
ceiving and imparting energy from or to the ponder- 
able units of matter." 12 

In this respect the ether is very like matter. In- 
deed, they acknowledge it to be a kind of matter: 

""The Story of Creation, a Plain Account of Evolution," by 
Prof. Edw. Clodd, F. R. S. I use the American reprint by the 
Humboldt Library. 

12 "Force and Energy," p. 30. 



Scientific World-Building. 85 

"Matter ... is also present throughout space 
in the imponderable state known as ether." 13 

This assumption is made because of that magnifi- 
cent law, discovered long since the time of La Place, 
that power can neither be created nor destroyed. 
Hence, as their nebula condensed, they must have 
something to which the enormous amount of result- 
ing radiant energy (heat, etc.) can be transferred, but 
not lost. But what right have they to assume that the 
ether, which they have confessed is a kind of matter, 
is subject to separative power (energy), but not to 
aggregative power or attraction? Mr. Allen says 
that bodies, molecules, atoms, "electric units," and 
I suppose we must now say "cathode ray units" also 
— are susceptible of both force and energy, which 
terms he uses in the somewhat peculiar sense of ag- 
gregative and separative power. What common 
sense is there in assuming that the ether is not subject 
to weight or gravity, though they admit it has all the 
other properties of matter? 14 Is it probable? Is it 
even moderately reasonable? 

We have already shown in the previous chapter that 
this idea of the ether was invented many years ago, 
professedly to help us in understanding how light and 
radiant energy can be transmitted through space, 
where ordinary matter, such as we know it, certainly 
does not exist. But we have also shown that this 
hypothetical ether is acknowledged by even Herbert 
Spencer to be of no service whatever in helping us 

13 "Story of Creation," p. 119. 

14 See the address of Lord Kelvin before the British Association 
at Glasgow, reported in Nature, October 24, 1901, pp. 626-629. 



86 Modem Christianity and Modem Science. 

to understand this problem, since it does not explain 
how the waves of light pass from one atom of the 
ether to another atom ; for it is a necessary part of the 
hypothesis that the atoms of the ether are never in 
contact, but immeasurably more distant from one an- 
other than are the particles of ordinary matter. We 
have in addition shown that this idea of the ether is 
equally useless, even as an hypothesis, in the ordinary 
work of science, and that it is of service only in these 
speculations concerning world-building. But I really 
know not how to answer these speculations, when 
even the very facts on which they rely to make good 
their theory seem to have been expressly invented for 
the occasion. 

The theory is not helped by asking hard ques- 
tions about the relative distribution of matter 
through space, or what becomes of the radiant energy 
that we may say is "lost" in space. We are not in 
the world-making business. We do not feel obliged 
to deal with matters so beyond the limits of reason 
and revelation. The burden of proof rests with them. 
They have entered that line, therefore let them make 
their theory intelligible and free from manifest ab- 
surdities before investing it with the sacred name of 
science. 

But what would happen if all matter, the ether 
included, is equally subject to the laws of separation 
and attraction? Whatever else might be the result, 
it seems clear that attraction would never so get the 
upper hand of separative energy; that is, the nebula 
would not even begin to aggregate together; or, even 
if aggregated into masses as the universe is now, it 



Scientific World-Building. 87 

would rapidly tend to become homogeneous through- 
out, force and energy, in Mr. Allen's peculiar sense 
of the words, exactly balancing each other. The mol- 
ecules of the original nebula would certainly continue 
to maintain a masterly inactivity. 

But there is another way in which the law of the 
conservation of energy is against the theory. The 
present order of things certainly had a beginning, 
and must as surely have an end. The whole uni- 
verse, solar system and all the other systems through 
limitless space, must, according to their speculations, 
become one cold, lifeless mass, with all its energy 
dissipated; or, as they seem to prefer, if matter is 
eternal, a new order of things will be instituted, and 
the same dismal farce gone through, sin and misery 
ever the most prominent characteristic. 

''Ceaseless redistribution of matter involves the be- 
ginning of another state of things." 15 

But this is nothing but a huge perpetual-motion 
machine, that forever keeps itself running, a concep- 
tion so contrary to the first principles of mechanics 
as not to need any refutation. Their great chief, Mr. 
Herbert Spencer, tells us that the development the- 
ory "works after a method quite different from that 
of human mechanics." I should think so. But 
what then becomes of the "observed uniformity of 
nature," on which they wish us to rely? There is 
certainly nothing like a perpetual-motion machine 
known to the mind of man. No power in a machine 
can keep it running even after it has been started. 
They and not we are the ones who have forsaken the 



15 "Story of Creation," p. 121. 



88 Modem Christianity and Modern Science. 

"solid ground of nature," to which the mind must 
trust "which builds for aye." So much for the latest 
edition (so far as I am aware) of the nebular theory, 
which has been palmed off upon the public in the 
name of science. 

But, to return to our general view of the theory, 
I shall only give one more of the many other prob- 
lems that its advocates have to solve. The two ele- 
ments, oxygen and nitrogen, which constitute by far 
the largest part of our earth and its surrounding enve- 
lopes of air and water, are both conspicuously absent 
from the spectrum of the sun. Or, according to the 
conundrum which Lord Salisbury, then president ot 
the British Association for the Advancement of Sci- 
ence, propounded at the sixty-fourth annual meeting 
of that body: — 

"If the earth is a detached bit, whirled off the mass 
of the sun, how comes it that, in leaving him, we 
cleaned him out so completely of his nitrogen and 
oxygen that not a trace of these gases remains to be 
discovered, even by the sensitive vision of the spec- 
troscope?" 

Every comet, too, that shows its nose inside our 
solar system laughs at the nebular hypothesis; and 
now and then, for a change, away outside our sys- 
tem, we have fixed stars blazing up suddenly and 
disappearing to the naked eye, like the late Nova 16 in 



16 More recently this interesting star has put in a thundering 
rejoinder to the arguments of the nebulists by positively reversing 
their theory right before their eyes, i. e., changing from an ordi- 
nary star into a true nebula. And instead of requiring millions 
of ages for the work, the change only occupied a few weeks. 
It faces the scientific world as a tremendous mystery. Prof. 



WSMBk 




Nebulosity about Nova Persei, Sept. 20, 1901. From a photograph by Prof. 
G. W. Ritchey with the two-foot reflecting telescope of the Yerkes Observatory-. 
Exposure three hours fifty minutes. 

Kindness of the Scientific American. 




Nebulosity about Nova Persei, Nov. 13, 1901. Photographed by Prof. G. W. 
Ritchey with the two-foot telescope of Yerkes Observatory. Exposure seven 
hours. 

Kindness of the Scientific American, 



Scientific W orld-Building. 89 

Perseus, and some even to the telescope-aided vision, 
to keep our astronomers busy guessing. 

That the law of gravitation alone is sufficient to 
keep our solar system in order even now seems emi- 
nently doubtful; that it, or all the known laws of 
physics and mechanics put together, are sufficient to 
explain their origin from an original nebula, whether 
cold or hot, is preposterous and absurd. On the 
contrary, the various component parts of our solar 
system have all the appearance of having been ex- 
pressly prepared for the particular place and service 
which they fill, just as it is recorded of the temple of 
Solomon, "built of stone, made ready before it was 
brought hither." In short, the whole nebular hy- 
pothesis is very evidently only a clumsy makeshift, as 
a substitute for the sublime words that open the rec- 
ord of our origin, as given in the Christian's Bible, 
"In the beginning God created the heaven and the 
earth." 

Of course, the origin of our world was according 
to law, and the laws of nature. How could the or- 
igin of nature be contrary to nature? No one ever 
dreamed of such a thing until some atheists invented 



Garret Serviss, an astronomical writer of note, says with reference 
to it (San Francisco Examiner, Dec. 29, 1901): "This [the nebula 
in Perseus] is the nearest thing to a new creation in the heavens 
that has ever been witnessed," and further remarks, "I/wq could 
think that the process which these motions reveal is really the 
formation of something resembling our solar system, then we 
should have to admit that the creation of worlds may be effected 
in a period measured by months and years instead of gigantic 
lapses of time, and the imagination would be led back to the 
scriptural account of the making of the world in six days." One 
is constrained to ask, Why not as well think that as to adopt some 
uncertain hypothesis? "If weak thy faith, why choose the harder 
side?" 



9° Modern Christianity and Modem Science. 

this libel on the Word of God, because it served their 
purpose. "God is not the author of confusion," and 
He doubtless formed our cosmos by some beautiful 
and regular process, but just how He has not in- 
formed us; and it is quite probable that the reason 
He has not informed us is because our finite minds 
could not understand any explanation that could be 
given. One of us might as well try to explain to an 
infant how a steamship is made. God's creative 
power is as incomprehensible as His existence. 

The nebular theory, like all other cosmogonies, is 
utterly puerile. To some it sounds more sensible 
than those of the Chinese or Hindoos, or that given 
by Plato in his "Timaeus," but solely because it enters 
more into details, and, by pretending to give a cir- 
cumstantial account of how creation was brought 
about, it confuses and dazzles the human mind. It 
talks about things beyond our knowledge, which 
often seems the same as talking wisdom. Our the- 
orizing friends have yet to learn that most funda- 
mental of all truths, that reason, apart from divine 
guidance, will trick us at every turn, just as our senses 
do until trained to see, and feel, and hear. Reason 
is the highest and noblest faculty that we possess, 
but, like all our faculties, is subject to the limitations 
and imperfections of mortality and sin. It needs the 
illumination of divine light to keep us from uncon- 
sciously incorporating our own secret wishes and 
predilections with our explanations of the mysteries 
of nature. The shores of time are strewn with the 
sad wrecks of human speculations, built with the 
greatest care by giant minds, who thought they could 
traverse the channels of the great unknown without 
a pilot. 



CHAPTER IV. 

"Molten though Rigid." 

An objection that is common to every form of the 
nebular theory as yet formulated is that it always 
ends with our planet a cooling globe, and millions 
and millions of years since life started on it, and with 
its interior still a heated, perhaps liquid, mass. It 
is true that scientists have now quite generally come 
to the conclusion that our world is solid throughout. 
As one of the very foremost scientific journals in the 
world remarks, "Modern analysis tends to the con- 
clusion that our globe is solid throughout." 2 

A consideration of the physical results of the tides 
of this interior molten sea, with other problems al- 
most equally formidable, have driven all but the old- 
school geologists to this conclusion sore against 
their wills, for it deprives them of their traditional 
methods of mountain-making and their charmingly 
simple ways of accounting for earthquakes and vol- 
canoes, to say nothing of the dark doubts it casts 
upon their old, old story of a "pulsating crust," as 
Dawson calls it, with half of the continents alternately - 

^'Its [the earth's] center may be, and probably is, still occu- 
pied by a molten (though rigid) mass, whose heat has not yet 
been fully conducted away." — Force and Energy, p. 37, by 
Grant Allen, Humboldt Library. 

2 Nature , February 28, 1901, p. 414. 

(91) 



92 Modern Christianity and Modem Science. 

rising and falling, even during the "latest" of geolog- 
ical times. 

If any one wishes to see how hard geologists will 
work to make out a case in favor of a heated interior 
for our world, and the thinness and present mobility 
of its "crust," let him read "Controverted Questions 
of Geology," by Joseph Prestwich, D. C. L., F. R. S., 
etc. (1895), who undoubtedly ranks as one of the 
very leading geologists of England. It is altogether 
a very candid discussion, as would be expected from 
a professor in Oxford University; but he begins by 
assuming that all admit the "original molten state of 
the globe," 3 and his whole discussion is with the physi- 
cists (Lord Kelvin, the late Professor Tait, and their 
fellows) as to how thick the "crust" is now. It 
would be tedious to go into the technical discussion 
of the subject, but I may say that in Article V he 
seems to prove conclusively (1) that the cause of the 
uplift of mountain areas, and the squeezing and 
crumpling of their strata, must lie at no great dis- 
tance beneath the surface; (2) that their traditional 
explanation of "volcanic action is incompatible with 
a thick crust;" (3) that, if the increase of heat with 
increase of depth is uniform down below the limits of 
actual experiment, "the heat at a depth of about 30 
miles would be such as to fuse the basic rocks." 4 

But I suppose I would not be doing justice to the 
subject if I did not give at least a summary of Dr. 
Prestwieh's arguments. 

8 Page 4. 
4 Page 158. 



"Molten though Rigid." 93 

On the first point he gives an outline of the well- 
known geological facts that the great mountain 
chains invariably have the appearance of having been 
ridged up by the folding and crumpling of the top 
strata, and their resulting elevation into ridges, 
caused by some strong lateral pressure exerted on 
their edges, just as a very thin or somewhat damp 
piece of paper will ridge up in the middle if it be laid 
out on a table and the opposite edges be shoved 
toward one another. "In the Alps there are seven, 
if not more, of these great folds, each constituting 
a mountain chain. In a straight line across they 
measure about 130 miles; but if the strata were 
stretched out in the original planes, it is estimated 
that they would occupy a space of about 200 miles." 5 

After giving other examples even more striking, 
he adds: — 

"It is difficult to see how these corrugations of 
the earth's crust are to be accounted for, unless we 
assume that the crust rests on a yielding substratum, 
and that of no great thickness. For if the earth were 
solid throughout, the tangential pressure would re- 
sult not in distorting or crumpling, but in crushing 
and breaking. No such results are to be seen, and 
the strata have, down to the time of the youngest 
mountains, yielded, as only a free surface-plate could, 
to the deformation caused by the lateral pressure. " 
"Let us suppose not entire solidity, but a crust 800 
miles, or even half 800 miles, thick. What would 
be the magnitude of a mountain chain resulting from 
the crumpling and upthrow of such a mass of rocks? 

6 Page 149. 



94 Modern Christianity and Modern Science. 

. . . for if a solid plate of any kind be broken, 
and the fractured edges turned up, by reciprocal 
pressure in presence of a resisting body beneath, the 
width of the protruding mass will bear a definite rela- 
tion to the thickness of the plate. If, on the other 
hand, the plate is sufficiently pliable to yield without 
fracture, and should be bent into folds, the height of 
the arches and the width across the folds will in like 
manner be proportionate to the thickness of the 
plate." 6 

He then adds the very pertinent question, "Would 
it not rather appear that a crust even of 30 miles 
is in excess of what the height and breadth of any 
mountain chain would, on this finding, indicate " 
I should think so. 

On the second point, or that relating to volcanic 
action, he asks how we are to imagine "that a col- 
umn of lava could traverse a crust 800 to 1,000 miles 
thick without the loss of so much heat as to cause 



6 Pages 150, 151. But we must remember that on a smaller 
scale very many of the soft surface beds have likewise been folded 
over each other, like a flattened form of the letter "S," so that, as 
Lyell says, "a continuous seam of fine loose sand between two 
layers of gravel or loam might be pierced three times in one per- 
pendicular boring;" though the underlying horizontal beds "have 
not participated in these movements in the smallest degree." 
And as far as I know, there is almost every possible stage of 
gradation between the giant folds in the Alps or the Andes, and 
these similarly crinkled surface beds on the coast of Norfolk, 
England, to which Lyell refers. Hence the same cause that pro- 
duced one case probably produced all. Therefore, as these 
Cromer beds in Norfolk were positively folded in some manner 
without resting on any "yielding substratum," we evidently do 
not need a fluid interior to explain mountain making on a larger 
scale. See note, page 176. 



"Molten though Rigid." 95 

the lava to lose its fluidity and consolidate before 
it could reach the surface." 7 

To meet this difficulty, he says that Mr. Hopkins 
has suggested that these eruptions may originate in 
vast cavities or pockets "filled with fluid incandescent 
matter, either entirely insulated or perhaps commu- 
nicating in some cases by obstructed channels," 

But besides the objections advanced by Professor 
Prestwich, I would like to ask the advocates of such 
a makeshift theory what rationality there is in sup- 
posing the earth to consist of a solid shell enclosing 
a solid nucleus with a molten fluid zone in between? 
What could originate such a state? to say nothing 
of preserving it these millions of ages, as they say. 
But would even this get rid of the mathematical ob- 
jection in regard to the earth's rigidity? 

The other point made by the learned geologist to 
prove a thin crust over a molten nucleus is that, if 
the increased heat with increase of depth continues 
uniform down into the bowels of the earth, "the heat 
at a depth of about 30 miles would be such as to 
fuse the basic rocks." But any conclusions based 
upon an "if" of such an extremely doubtful character 
(for actual scientific experiments have only very 
rarely extended to a mile or so, and exhibit the most 
varied rates of increase, pointing not to one central 
source, but to various local sources, of heat) must 
be of little weight; and if we find later sufficient causes 
to explain the folding and crumpling of the rocks, 
and a reasonable explanation of earthquakes and vol- 
canoes, without imagining a fluid interior to our 



7 Pages 159, 160. 



96 Modern Christianity and Modern Science. 

earth, and thus completely reconcile the utterly an- 
tagonistic conclusions of the mathematicians and the 
geologists, this increase of heat as we go down into 
the earth will not concern us very much, for the ex- 
treme cases that could not well be accounted for by 
chemical action might well be due to the same cause 
as the volcanic phenomena. 8 More than this, I may 
say that I have tried to average the exhaustive tables 
given by this author of "all the observations" on 
underground temperatures taken in mines, artesian 
wells, etc., of which he "could find record;" 9 and I 
find that the average (excluding fractions) of the 
actual temperatures at all the various depths taken is 
less than 6g° Fahr., which is scarcely higher than we 
may well suppose the 'surf ace temperature to have been 

8 There is no doubt that pressure under certain conditions tends 
to generate heat; for instance, if we take a cubic foot of earthy 
matter and pile upon it foot after foot of the same material, it has 
been calculated that, if we could extend this column a little over 
fifty-nine miles, we would have a temperature approximating 6,400 
degrees, which would, of course, melt all known rocks. But, 
while heat is undoubtedly thus generated by pressure as long as 
there is any movement of the particles to accommodate themselves 
to the pressure, it is more than doubtful if any heat whatever 
would be produced by any amount of pressure after stable equi- 
librium has been reached , as is evidently the case in our globe. This 
will amply account for the metamorphism and crystallization of 
the sedimentary strata where they have been folded and crumpled 
in mountain-making; but as for anything further, or imagining 
that these conditions prevailed in the formation of our earth, it is, 
I take it, only another way of stating the nebular theory, and 
lands us in just the same condition,— with our world white hot 
inside,— -which, as this chapter is designed to show, is contrary to 
both geology and physics. 

9 Pages 249-264. 



"Molten though Rigid/' 97 

when the Tertiary fossils were laid down, for they 
show a semitropical climate even in the Arctic re- 
gions. Hence I think we ought to have a rest from 
this threadbare argument for a while, or until they 
have got down a good deal deeper than any observa- 
tions yet recorded. 

For be it clearly understood that, while the geol- 
ogists can thus clearly prove that the cause of all 
these geological actions must lie at no great depth 
beneath the surface, the physicists, led by Mr. Hop- 
kins, Lord Kelvin, and the late Professor Tait, have 
decided, in their strictly mathematical fashion, that 
our earth must be solid throughout. I must give 
Lord Kelvin's own words: "Whatever be its age, we 
may be quite sure the earth is solid in its interior; 
not, I admit, throughout its whole volume, for there 
certainly are spaces in volcanic regions occupied by 
liquid lava; but whatever portion of the whole mass 
is liquid, whether the waters of the ocean or melted 
matter in the interior, these portions are small in 
comparison with the whole ; and we must utterly reject 
any geological hypothesis which, whether for explain- 
ing underground heat or ancient upheavals and sub- 
sidences of the solid crust, or earthquakes, or existing 
volcanoes, assumes the solid earth to be a shell of 30, 
or 100, or 500, or 1,000 kilometers thickness resting 
on an interior liquid mass." 10 

What, then, is the conclusion to which these things 
would bring us? — Just this: If these conclusions of 
the geologists and those of the physicists are equally 
certain and reliable, and there seems no good reason 

10 Report British Association, 1876, pp. 6, 7. 

7 



98 Modern Christianity and Modern Science. 

to doubt either party, then their hopeless disagree- 
ment must be due to some false premise common to 
both. This is a well-known principle. When two 
well-informed persons are confirmed in hopeless dis- 
agreement, it is almost certain that they are both 
wrong on some point common to both that has been 
left out of the mutual consideration. Each sees the 
absurdities of the other, and therefore these absurd- 
ities must from their common standpoint have a real 
existence, and it is only by rising to some higher view 
that we can get at the real truth in the matter. 

It will not be difficult to discern the fallacy that 
is common to both the physicists and the geologists. 
It lies in the mutual assumption that our earth is 
a cooling globe. We may not know what the past 
history of our world has been, or how it originated; 
but if we can give a reasonable explanation of the 
geological phenomena, one thing would then seem 
almost certain, — it ought to be considered demon- 
strated beyond all cavil that it did not originate by 
the hot process. At least, if such should have been 
its beginning as a globe, this fact has not the slight- 
est bearing on either the formation of mountains, the 
mobility of the crust in the past, or the present action 
of earthquakes or volcanoes. 

The scientists may press upon us here with ques- 
tions as to how our world was made, or what its in- 
terior is really like at present. Suppose we can not 
tell. We are not in the world-making business. If 
our scientists are bound to speculate on such things, 
they are free to do so. We may indeed say with 
Emerson that "the world was built in order, and the 



"Molten though Rigid/' 99 

stones march in tune." But I prefer to keep well 
within the bounds of known facts. 

They often tell us that the shape of our world,-— 
slightly bulging at the equator and flattened at the 
poles, — is proof positive that its substance must once 
have been in a fluid condition. But it would have 
taken this shape had its fluidity been due to water 
instead of fire. A rotating ball of mud would take 
the same shape as a mass of lava of the same consist- 
ence, so that this of itself proves nothing. And as 
to our earth's interior, we really know very little 
about it, not much more than a fly does of an or- 
ange's pulp by walking over its surface and sucking 
at its rind. Our deepest mines — about 6,500 feet — 
are only like a pin-prick. As for examining even 
the surface, the fly would have decidedly the advan- 
tage. Nearly three-fourths of our world is covered 
with water, and by far the larger share of the remain- 
der has never been really examined by any scientist. 
They tell us that the materials in its interior must 
be very heavy; that, taken as a whole, our earth has 
a specific gravity (5.6) about double that of the 
average rocks at the surface (quartz being 2.65 and 
granite 2.72), or a little less than cast iron. Taken 
as a whole, it must also be about as rigid as steel, 
though through some cause or causes parts of the 
surface strata are, or at least have been, extremely 
mobile. We also know that beneath the surface in 
very many parts of the world there are even now ex- 
tensive subterranean fires, that shake us up occasion- 
ally, and now and then take to bubbling up through 
holes in the ground. These are a few of the general 

■ Lof C. 



ioo Modern Christianity and Modern Science. 

facts to be considered, and the probable explanations 
of some of them we must now seek to determine. 

We might say a word here about the effects of 
pressure in producing metamorphic and crystalline 
rocks out of the sedimentary strata, as found in all 
the mountain ranges where the strata have been 
folded and crumpled; but we are relieved of all 
necessity of accounting for the formation of the 
various so-called igneous rocks, for at the last an- 
nual meeting of the English Geological Society 
(Feb. 15, 1 901) the president, J. J. H. Teall, F. R. S., 
summed up the results of the year's work in this di- 
rection by saying that "the origin of species, so far 
as igneous rocks are concerned, is a problem the 
final solution of which has been handed on by the 
nineteenth century to its successor." 11 They can 
never hope to explain the very diverse kinds of these 
rocks as originating from the one great molten mass 
in our earth's interior. They might as well expect 
to get both salt water and fresh from the same faucet. 

But if the great mountain ranges have been 
formed by a thin crust of strata over a molten inte- 
rior being crumpled and folded upwards by the lateral 
pressure acting over the resistance from beneath, as 
they say, we would most naturally look for volcanoes 
along these lines of folding, for the volcanoes are 
supposed to connect directly with the molten inte- 
rior. But this is not where we find volcanoes, for, as 
Prestwich says: — 

"The great mountain ranges of the Alps and 
Pyrenees, where the strata are tilted, contorted, and 



11 Nature, March 14, 1901, p. 482. 



"Molten though Rigid." 101 

enormously crushed, do not contain a single vol- 
cano; the strata are highly metamorphosed, yet 
show no traces of igneous fusion. In the Andes the 
volcanoes are mostly situated on flanking ridges, or 
Dn the lower grounds at their base, and rarely on the 
high central ridges. We must, in fact, look for vol- 
canoes on lines of fissure rather than on lines of 
fault." 12 

But even this slender hope is denied them, for 
Sir Archibald Geikie, in reviewing the latest vol- 
umes issued by the Italian Geological Survey and 
the Royal Academy of Naples, dealing with the active 
and extinct volcanoes of Italy, gives as the very latest 
and best conclusions on the subject that no traces 
of fissure connecting the various volcanoes can be 
made out. 13 

As to the real causes of the folding and crumpling 
of the strata, I shall beg the reader's permission to 
postpone a consideration of this subject until chapter 
6, where he will find what little light I have on the 
subject. 

We now come to the subject of earthquakes and 
volcanoes, phenomena which in the popular mind are 
proof positive that the whole interior of our globe is 
a vast mass of fiery liquid rock, with which the craters 
of the volcanoes communicate directly, and of which 
they are, as it were, but the blow-holes. But sci- 
entific men have long recognized the difficulties sur- 



12 "Controverted Questions," pp. 86, 87. 

13 Nature, May 30, 1901, pp. 103-106. 



102 Modern Christianity and Modern Science. 

rounding such a view, some of which they have in- 
deed been able to remove by ingenious suppositions. 

One of these numerous difficulties, which they have 
not been able to entirely remove, is very concisely 
stated in a well-known American journal: "More- 
over, contemporaneous not far distant vents some- 
times furnish quite different material. This could 
hardly be possible if all volcanoes had a common 
source." u 

The extremely large volumes of steam and other 
vapors given off from volcanoes during eruptions 
have been made the foundation of perhaps the most 
generally-received theory of volcanic action current 
at the present time, viz., that originated by Mr. 
Poulett-Scrope. How the water comes to get mixed 
up with the fiery liquid and completely distributed 
through the whole mass, as the theory requires, "just 
as much as it is necessary that the powder in the gun- 
barrel should be at the back of the shot;" 15 or "why, 
the passage to the exterior once opened, the erup- 
tion should cease until all the mass susceptible of 
boiling over should be expelled," and thus volcanoes 
forever become extinct after one eruption, 16 the 
originator of the theory has not explained. One 
would certainly think that, if volcanic action were 
due to the causes he has assigned, the occluded va- 
por would be blown off once and forever. 

Another serious objection to this view is stated by 
our author, as follows: — 



u Popular Science Monthly, July, 1895, p. 305. 
15 "Controverted Questions," p. 84. 
16 Id., p. 104. 



"Molten though Rigid!' 103 

"There are an ample number of carefully-recorded 
cases to show that the discharge of lava is not in 
proportion to the discharge of steam, nor is the dis- 
charge of steam always in accordance with the escape 
of lava, which they should be if the hypothesis were 
correct. These conditions would, on the contrary, 
seem to be perfectly independent one of the other." 17 

It would be tiresome to enter into all the difficul- 
ties attending this and all other theories based on the 
primary idea that the vast interior of our globe is 
still a heated, perhaps liquid mass, resulting from 
our earth being a cooling sun on a small scale. But 
if "modern analysis tends to the conclusion that our 
globe is solid throughout," it is quite evident that 
earthquakes and volcanoes must affect only the sur- 
face rocks, or, in other words, must be confined to 
the few thousand feet of superficial strata. We 
have only now to consider an explanation of vol- 
canic action, which to me seems amply sufficient to 
account for all the known facts. By observations 
in deep mines, it has been long understood that the 
chemical decomposition by water of various kinds of 
rock, such as iron and copper pyrites, will produce 
considerable heat. To give an extreme but familiar 
example of somewhat the same nature, we know that 
water and lime are capable of generating a furious 
heat as they unite, if in any considerable quantities. 
Sir Humphrey Davy, and, later, Gay-Lussac, the 
French chemist and physicist, made these facts the 
foundations of their chemical theories of the causes 
of earthquakes and volcanoes. Even Sir Charles 



" Trl 

ia -> p. 



95- 



104 Modem Christianity and Modem Science. 

Lyell seemed to think them sufficient to account for 
the volcanic phenomena. 

But we have another and far more potent cause cf 
these phenomena, which seems to have been strangely 
overlooked, viz., the burning of vast coal fields deep 
beneath the ground. And, allowing the chemical 
action above mentioned as a partial cause, we have 
in the subterranean burning of vast coal and oil 
deposits a full and complete explanation, as it seems 
to me, of all earthquake or volcanic phenomena, so 
constantly brought forward as proof positive of our 
earth being molten inside. Nor does the writer pre- 
tend to advance this as an idea of his own devising. 
He makes no pretensions to being a geologist, but he 
knows this idea to be held by numerous science teach- 
ers scattered all over America, though it does not seem 
to have received any proper consideration from our 
geologists. 

When we come to deal, in succeeding chapters, with 
the other geological phenomena, we shall have some- 
thing to say concerning the origin of coal. For the 
present it will suffice to say that some cause, at some 
time, buried vast forests deep beneath the surface of 
the ground in almost every quarter of the globe. 
And it is a singular fact, to say the least, that those 
countries most subject to earthquakes, and having 
their surfaces dotted with fire-belching volcanoes, are 
countries where practically no coal is to be found. 
Why should we not suppose that these countries also 
have their coal deposits, but buried so deep that we 
can not get at them? 

"Very little is known of the substrata of a volcanic 



"Molten though Rigid/' 105 

mountain. We know that Vesuvius, Etna, and 
Hecla stand on Tertiary strata; that some volcanoes 
in America stand on Cretaceous or Jurassic strata, 
and others on the older rocks, but of the stratigraph- 
ical details underground we have very scanty infor- 
mation." 18 It would seem quite evident that, in the 
above cases at least, there may be vast carboniferous 
areas deep down in the earth. If this coal and oil 
should ignite, it might burn for hundreds of years, 
an example of which on a small scale is given us in 
the numerous coal mines which now and then 
take fire, and defy all human efforts to put them out. 

The Summit Hill Colliery, Pennsylvania, owned 
by the Lehigh Coal and Navigation Company, is a 
good example. It has been burning for forty years, 
and the company has spent a million dollars or so in 
fruitless endeavor to extinguish the awful fires below. 
About a year and a half ago the fire began eating its 
way through the rich veins of coal in the Panther 
Creek Valley, and the Spring Tunnel Colliery had to 
close, throwing some three hundred men out of em- 
ployment. I can not say just how the case stands at 
present. 

In the case of fires in Nova Scotia coal mines, 
whole rivers have sometimes been turned in upon the 
raging flames, with apparently little immediate effect, 
though just at present I do not think any of them are 
burning. In fact, Dr. Robert Bell, F. R. S., Director 
of the Geological Survey of Canada, lately wrote 
me : — 



18 "Controverted Questions," p. 119. 



106 Modern Christianity and Modern Science. 

I can only recall one example of a coal or lignite 
seam actually burning underground at the present 
moment. This occurs on the east bank of the Mac- 
kenzie River, about one mile above Fort Norman, at 
the junction of Great Bear Lake River with the 
Mackenzie" (near the Arctic Circle). 

In the same communication he also says : — 

"We have some examples near the Saskatchewan 
River, one of which occurs on the North Branch, 
about sixty miles above Edmonton, where a thick 
seam of lignite coal has been burnt a short distance 
underground to a breadth of a quarter of a mile back 
from the river in prehistoric times; and the rock 
which was in immediate contact with the coal had 
become more or less fused, and is said to somewhat 
resemble some volcanic products/' 

Of course, Dr. Bell is here speaking only of the 
Dominion. Other similar examples could be found 
in almost any country. There is a mine in the north 
of England which has, I think, been burning con- 
tinuously for about a century. And, of course, the 
deeper in the earth such fires occur, the more will they 
resemble volcanic phenomena. 

As millions of tons are thus consumed beneath the 
ground, the vast quantities of adjacent limestone 
would be burned, perhaps whole miles of rock even 
melted with the intense heat. The action of some 
large quantity of water suddenly breaking in upon 
this mass of lime and melted ore would be like a blow 
upon nitroglycerine. To say nothing of the heat, 
which would, if possible, be increased in fury, the 
resulting explosions would shake half a continent to 



"Molten though Rigid." 107 

its foundations. The confined steam and other gases 
would struggle for an outlet, and, having found or 
made one, vast fountains of smoke, steam, mud, and 
melted rock would be vomited forth upon the trem- 
bling earth, burying towns and villages forever from 
sight. 

That volcanic eruptions are almost always pre- 
ceded by the sudden disappearance of the water in 
the wells and springs of all the surrounding country, 
has long been a well-known fact. During an erup- 
tion of Mauna Loa, in the Hawaiian Islands, the sea 
water was in one case observed pouring down a fis- 
sure, which had opened in the ground, into the depths 
below 19 There are also doubtless vast underground 
reservoirs of water in almost every part of the globe, 
and these, being tapped by a fissure in the rocks, 
would act in the same manner. From the intense 
heat within, the in-rushing water would immediately 
flash into steam, and thus instantly expand to about 
1,700 times its original volume, which is over five 
times the expansive power of gunpowder, and nearly 
twice that of guncotton. 20 Would not a few tons 
of water thus exploding beneath the ground be suf- 
ficient to account for all the facts of earthquakes, as 
far as we know them? 

And I believe that all cases of upheaval and sub- 
sidence of the surface strata, at least within historic 
times, are due to these or associated causes. Sir 
Charles Lyell and his followers of the uniformitarian 
school have given us some alleged facts about the 



19 " Controverted Questions," p. 123. 
20 Vide, pp. 133, 134. 



108 Modern Christianity and Modern Science. 

slow and gradual change of level in Sweden or Green- 
land, but such data are, to say the least, of very am- 
biguous character, when compared with the numerous 
instances of islands suddenly rising from the bed of 
the ocean, and as suddenly disappearing. In short, I 
do not believe in any such slow and gradual elevation 
or subsidence of whole continents, such as the uni- 
formitarians, who worship at the altar of Chronos, 
always invoke in succession over the vast unknown 
past to account for the various fossil-bearing strata 
scattered over the world. 

Some small elevation and subsidence of limited 
areas is, of course, reasonable enough, as due entirely 
to the expansion and contraction of the superficial 
strata, caused by the heating or subsequent cooling 
of these rocks, as explained above; for experiments 
made some time since by the officers of the topo- 
graphical corps of United States engineers regarding 
the expansion of various rocks by heat, have shown 
that, "if a mass of sandstone a mile in thickness 
should be raised in temperature two hundred de- 
grees Fahr., it would expand sufficiently to lift its sur- 
face ten feet above its former level." Hence, if this 
thickness of rock were raised to anything near the 
fusing point of iron (2,912° Fahr.), or even of sili- 
con (1,500° Fahr.), we would have a far greater 
change of level than any that has actually been 
measured and calculated by scientists. Of course, the 
cooling of such a mass would cause the lifted surface 
to descend to its original position, a process which 
is perhaps going on in parts of Greenland and Sweden. 
Nor am I alone in saying that the data which have 



"Molten though Rigid." 109 

been given us concerning such earth movements hav- 
ing come about gradually over vast areas, are utterly 
insufficient. Such men as Pr estwich, M.u rchispn, and 
Sedgwick, the fathers of English geology, would be 
among the first to say that the few facts bearing on 
this subject, which have been gathered during the 
limits of recorded observation, are not only very 
few and limited, but ambiguous, to say the least. 

To take one of the most familiar examples given 
to prove a considerable gradual change, that of the 
columns of the ruined temple of Serapis, at Pozzuoli, 
on the Bay of Naples (the Puteoli of Acts 28:13), 
there is, of course, no possible doubt that, since this 
temple was built about two thousand years ago, the 
land thereabout must have sunk, and since risen again 
at least twenty feet; for a band around the columns 
eight feet wide, extending from about twelve feet to 
about twenty feet in height, has been perforated by 
the borings of marine shells, remains of which are 
still to be seen in the holes they have made, though 
the lower twelve feet are quite smooth. It is argued 
that the subsidence must have been so gradual as not 
to throw down the three columns of the temple which 
are still standing. But it is equally evident that it 
may have been so sudden as to throw down all but 
these three. The lower twelve feet certainly seem 
to have been covered by earth and mud quickly enough 
to have completely protected them from the attacks 
of these borers. Nor is this Bay of Naples so far 
removed from all volcanic centers as to make some 
sudden earthquake action an improbable explanation. 
In short, it is only reasonable to admit that all their 



no Modem Christianity and Modern Science. 

examples put together do not prove, in any real sense 
of the word, that any gradual rise or subsidence of 
any considerable area is now going on, or has been 
going on during the historic period. 

But instances of very sudden changes of level 
are common enough. During the night of January 
2 3> i ^55j a considerable part of New Zealand was 
thus elevated; and in Chile, in 1822, fully 200,000 
square miles of territory between the Andes and the 
Pacific rose to a height of from two to seven feet. In 
the historic earthquake of Lisbon, in 1755, where 
60,000 persons are said to have perished in six min- 
utes, a large portion of the city was permanently 
engulfed 600 feet beneath the waters of the bay. 
Also in 1 819, 2,000 square miles of land near the 
mouth of the Indus sank out of sight during an 
earthquake, and became an inland sea ; while other por- 
tions of the country were elevated to a nearly uniform 
height of 10 feet. But these changes are all due to 
the causes assigned above to the action of earthquakes 
or volcanoes in general. And, as we shall see in the 
succeeding chapters, there are far better ways of ac- 
counting for the fossil-bearing rocks than to invoke 
the gradual rise and subsidence of large areas pro- 
longed over unmeasured geological ages. 

In fact, from a consideration of the arguments 
which I have endeavored to outline above, we may 
consider it now almost demonstrated that our earth 
is not a cooling globe; and thus one more very im- 
portant stage in the process of evolving the genius 
of human thought from the gas of the nebulous cloud 
is seen to be without foundation. 



"Molten though Rigid." in 

And this theory of our earth being a cooling globe, 
and not yet by any means cooled throughout, is, I 
take it, the only positive objection that the Bible 
furnishes us against the nebular theory. We would 
have no more objection, per se, to considering the 
manner in which a world was formed than the way 
in which a chicken is produced from the egg, if it 
did not land us in something contrary alike to the 
Word and to common sense. Of course, in the case 
of either the world or the chicken, we must have the 
materials, and some competent outside cause to 
originate the conditions and conduct the process; 
they both require the continual presence and foster- 
ing care of the great Creator. We are getting no 
nearer the real mystery in the case by saying that all 
the tissues of the chick are built up by the proto- 
plasm in the egg. The protoplasm in the toes is 
the same as that in the little creature's brain Why 
does the one build up claws and the other brain cells? 
Does memory guide these little things in their won- 
derful division of labor? But they all started from one 
original germ cell, hence they all ought to> have the 
same memory pictures. Or have they entered into a 
mutual-benefit arrangement, like the members of a 
community, as Haeckel would have us believe, each 
contributing by actual desire and effort, I suppose, 
an individual share to the general progress of the 
whole? — No; they have all the appearance of being 
mere automata working at the direct bidding of a 
Master Mind. Every step of the process needs a 
Creator, just as much as the first cell division. In 
the words of one of the very highest of scientific 



H2 Modern Christianity and Modern Science. 

authorities already quoted, "We still do not know 
why a certain cell becomes a gland-cell, another a 
ganglion-cell; why one cell gives rise to a smooth 
muscle-fiber, while a neighbor forms voluntary 
muscle;" and this also "at certain, usually predestined, 
times in particular places." And in the same way 
the idea of a Creator would not be disposed of, even 
if we could possibly hit upon the probable process of 
world-formation. We would not, by understanding 
the process, really get at the cause of the phenomena, 
any more than we do now at the real cause of life. 
From the scientific method the real mystery remains 
as much behind the veil as ever before. 

And it may be well to remember that the record 
in Genesis has not put the least direct limit upon our 
imaginations in accounting for the manner of our 
world's formation. It only says: "In the beginning 
God created the heaven and the earth. And the 
earth was without form, and void; and darkness was 
upon the face of the deep." 21 

This, be it clearly understood, and as other writers 
have so clearly pointed out, was before the six days 
of our world's creation proper began. The six literal 
days of creation, or peopling our world with life 
forms, begin with verse 3. They begin with the 
whole body of our world already in existence. How 
long it had been formed before this we are not told, 
and whether by a slow or rapid process we have no 
information. And, as we shall see hereafter, there 
is no ground to believe in the "interval theory," 
which would regard this as a lapsed condition, and 



31 Genesis 1:1, 2. 



"Molten though Rigid." 113 

all the geological strata as having been laid down in 
some previous state of unrecorded existence. Such 
a view is alike contrary to science and revelation. 
All that we can positively gather from the Biblical 
record is that, at the opening of the first week of 
mundane time, our globe was covered with vapors 
or waters, with the Spirit of God brooding upon the 
face of these waters. 

But if the Bible has left the real formation of our 
globe in obscurity as to time and manner, we can 
not say the same with regard to the things on our 
globe as we find them to-day. No believer in the 
Sabbath as the divine memorial of creation's week 
will hesitate to give as the distinct, positive teaching 
of Genesis that life has been on our globe only some 
six or seven thousand years; and that the earth as we 
know it, with its teeming animal and vegetable life, 
and man as the crowning work of all, was brought 
into existence in six literal days; and let scientists 
overthrow it if they can. 

They can call the language somewhat anthropo- 
morphic if they wish. The earnest Christians of all 
the best ages of the church have never made any 
effort to avoid what scientists stigmatize as anthropo- 
morphism, or the figure of attributing human feelings 
and motives to the Deity, and describing His actions 
as we would those of man. The Bible knows noth- 
ing of this bugbear of the scientists. When God 
says that He "created man in His own image" of 
mind and character, it is but natural that, when tell- 
ing us of His own acts and motives, He is not 
ashamed to describe them in terms familiar to us. 
"He_sj3eaks to us in our own language, that we may 
8 












H4 Modern Christianity and Modem Science. 

better understand Him." Language is so poor a 
medium of thought that, as one writer puts it, we 
have to represent even our own mental ideas by phys- 
ical images. How inevitable, then, that we should 
picture the divine nature by its human image! We 
can not avoid it if we are to think about Him at all. 
Independent, rational personality is the highest thing 
we know or can imagine. We are offering Him the 
very truest and noblest we have when we call Him a 
Person, though even this, the best we have, falls far 
short of the infinite reality. 

As to the Scripture's positive language that life 
has been on our globe some six thousand years or 
so, what have they found to prove it false? — "Oh, 
geology," they say, "geology! Have you no respect 
for the demonstrated facts of geology?" I certainly 
have the utmost respect for the real facts of this 
or any other branch of science. The book of nature 
is as sacred as the written Word, though far more 
liable to be misunderstood. The storied rocks have 
yielded up their treasures, though, as we shall see 
hereafter, they only grow eloquent to the truth of 
Genesis when we read them aright, by dealing only 
with the naked facts in the case. Facts and theories 
must be kept entirely distinct. And when atheists 
and unbelievers begin spinning their theories about 
these facts; when, for instance, they show us a fossil 
shell that they say is at least 50,000,600 years old, 
I can only answer, "Who told you so?" though my 
justification for such an apparently impudent question 
must be reserved till the next chapter. 

But before passing on to these questions of geol- 
ogy proper, we must glance for a moment at the 



"Molten though Rigid." 115 

problems clustering around the origin of life. We 
would not forget the history of Bathybius, the proto- 
types of Haeckel's monera, discovered and described 
so eloquently by Huxley in 1868, as the long-sought- 
for connecting link between the organic and inorganic 
worlds, but which, however, Huxley was at last 
obliged to admit before the British Association for 
the Advancement of Science, assembled at Sheffield, 
was, in fact, nothing more than a simple precipitate 
of sulphate of lime. But, to be serious, has any. one 
since the untiring experiments of Tyndall, Dallinger, 
and Pasteur, dared to intimate that we may yet at some 
future time originate life by artificial means?. But 
these theorists seem to consider that it would simplify 
the process immensely to place the scene back "beyond 
the abyss of geologically-recorded time," or off in 
some region among the slimy ooze at the ocean's 
bottom, where the investigator can never hope to go, 
just as Haeckel locates his "alalus," or ape-man, in 
Lemuria, an imaginary continent now at the bottom 
of the Indian Ocean. Man, or one of the higher ani- 
mals, they think, could not be produced from the 
inorganic in twenty- four hours, even by the Creator, 
though the same thing prolonged over a few million 
years would be a simpler thought, and more according 
to natural law. "It is a question of energy versus 
time," as Nicholson says. 

Creation by natural law, forsooth! Who ever had 
the audacity to intimate that creation could be other- 
wise than orderly and by natural law? How could 
the origin of nature be contrary to nature? The only 
thing we urge is that they have not yet discovered 



n6 Modern Christianity and Modern Science. 

the law, or even the process; nor are they likely to 
do so very soon. The origin of organic nature could 
not well have been otherwise than by natural process. 
Do they understand all natural processes? At some 
time life was not in existence on our globe. All 
agree that it had a beginning. Even if created by 
the great Creator, the living was at some time formed 
from the not-living or the not-material. It does not 
take even Huxley's famous "act of philosophic faith" 
to believe that. So that, in spite of all the haze that 
has been thrown about this question, the Biblical 
creation of the organic from the inorganic is no more 
contrary to, or even outside of, natural law than is 
evolution. The only difference is we have a com- 
petent cause, while they have nothing but the helpless 
molecules and atoms. 

But see what we avoid. According to the Bible, 
death in even the lower animals (and consequently 
all misery and suffering; the less is included in the 
greater) is only the result of sin on th~ part of man, 
the head of animated nature, a reflex or sympathetic 
result, if you will. But with evolution we have 
countless millions of years of creature suffering, cru- 
elty, and death before man appeared at all, cruelty 
and death that, as we shall show, have no moral 
meaning at all, save as the work of a fiend creator, 
or a bungling and incompetent one. 

As helping us to understand how this jump from 
the not-living to the living could be made, I can not 
do better than quote a somewhat long paragraph 
from Le Conte, who, as an out-and-out evolutionist, 
can not be charged with being prejudiced in favor 
of direct creation: — 



"Molten though Rigid." it J 

"Force and matter may be said to exist now on 
several distinct planes raised one above another. 
There is a sort of taxonomic scale of force and mat- 
ter. These are: (i) The plane of elements; (2) the 
plane of chemical compounds; (3) the plane of vegetal 
life; (4) the plane of animal life; and (5) the plane 
of rational and, as we hope, immortal life. Each 
plane has its own appropriate force and distinctive 
phenomena. On the first operates physical forces, 
producing physical phenomena only, for the opera- 
tion of chemical affinity immediately raises matter 
to the next plane. On the second plane operates, 
in addition to physical, also chemical forces, produc- 
ing all those changes by action and reaction the 
study of which constitutes the science of chemistry. 
On the third plane, in addition to the two preceding 
forces, with their characteristic phenomena, operates 
also life-force, producing the distinctive phenomena 
characteristic of living things. On the fourth plane, 
in addition to all lower forces and their phenomena, 
operates also a higher form of life-force characteristic 
of animals, producing the phenomena characteristic 
of sentient life, such as sensation, consciousness, and 
will. On the fifth plane, in addition to all the pre- 
ceding forces and phenomena, we have also the forces 
and phenomena characteristic of rational and moral 
life. 

"Now, although there are doubtless great differ- 
ences of level on each of these planes, yet there is a 
very distinct break between each. Although there 
are various degrees of the force characteristic of each, 
yet the difference between the characteristic forces 



n8 Modem Christianity and Modem Science. 

is one of kind as well as of degree. Although energy 
by transmutation may take all these different forms, 
and thus does now circulate up and down through 
all these planes, yet the passage from one plane up- 
ward to another is not a gradual passage by sliding 
scale, but at one bound. When the necessary con- 
ditions are present, a new and higher form of force 
at once appears, like a birth into a higher sphere. 
For example, when hydrogen and oxygen are 
brought together under proper conditions, water is 
born — a new thing, with new and wholly unexpected 
properties and powers, entirely different from those 
of its components. When CO2, H2O, and NH3 
are brought together under suitable conditions, viz., 
in the green leaves of plants, in the presence of sun- 
light, living protoplasm is then and there born, a 
something having entirely new and unexpected 
powers and properties. It is no gradual process, but 
sudden, like birth into a higher sphere." 22 

Let us consider these words. He says very truly 
that between each of these different planes there is 
"a very distinct break." The difference between 
them is "one of kind as well as of degree." "The pas- 
sage from one plane upward to another is not a grad- 
ual passage by sliding scale, but at one bound. 
W T hen the necessary conditions are present, a new 
and higher form of force at once appears, like birth 
into a higher sphere. . . . It is no gradual proc- 
ess, but sudden, like birth into a higher sphere." 

Surely here at least we have processes beyond 



22 " Evolution and Religious Thought," pp. 314-316 (Italics as I 
find them). 



"Molten though Rigid/' ng 

what are dreamt of in any materialistic philosophy. 
"It is no gradual process, but sudden. " Have they 
discovered the why? Do they ever expect to in this 
life? Perhaps not. The more exact and minute 
knowledge of recent years has only served to show 
more plainly the great gulfs fixed between these dif- 
ferent groups of things created, gulfs which their 
theory of inherent properties is powerless to explain 
or even comprehend. All theories about matter hav- 
ing innate properties seem like nonsense before such 
facts. The living at some time originated from the 
not-living. We call it creation. Can they find a 
better name? It is preposterous to call it a process 
of development or evolution due to the inherent prop- 
erties of the atoms, and effected by them alone. And 
yet it is doubtless as much according to "natural law" 
as are the invariable and exact combinations of chem- 
istry. We do not understand the ultimate reasons 
for chemical affinity any more than we do for gravi- 
tation. They are only expressions of the methodical, 
order-loving mind of Deity. Creation was only 
another action of the same Mind, and we are not 
really finding any new difficulty when we say that the 
processes or the reasons for creative action are be- 
yond our comprehension. When we can really solve 
some of the myriad problems right before our eyes, 
it will be time enough to complain about creation 
being incomprehensible or contrary to "natural law." 
Well, then, remembering that, even according to 
Huxley's "act of philosophic faith," the origin of the 
living from the not-living must at some time have 
taken place according to natural law, why should 
we suppose that such a process was confined to one 



120 Modem Christianity and Modern Science 

[ example? If, when the young planet "was passing 
through physical and chemical conditions which it 
can no more see again than a man can recall his in- 
fancy," the "necessary conditions" were favorable for 
cne such a creation of life, why not a few billion? 
Would the production of a few billion such begin- 
nings of protoplasm be any less "natural" than of one 
alone? Remember, however, that both the arrange- 
ment of these "necessary conditions," as well as the 
endowing matter with these "properties," not only 
requires a cause, but this cause must be intelligent, 
for there is indisputable design in this first origin of 
life. Even Darwin's aquatic grub demands a Cre- 
ator as much as does the Mosaic Adam. But to re- 
turn to our subject. The food for a developing em- 
bryo might, for aught that we know, be conveyed to 
it direct from the ultimate laboratories of nature, and 
it thus be built up by protoplasm in the usual way 
without the medium of a parent form — other than the 
great Father of all. Or would it be any less accord- 
ing to natural law to believe that a bird passed through 
all the usual stages of embryonic development from 
the not-living up to the full-fledged songster of the 
skies in one day — the fifth day of creation? And if 
one example, why not a million? For remember that 
the youthful earth was then passing through strange 
conditions, "which," as Huxley says, "it can no more 
see again than a man can recall his infancy." 

As I shall have occasion to remark more fully 
again, the higher forms differ from the lower only in 
having what the lower ones have plus something else. 
For this reason, and for this alone, the successive 
stages in embryonic development must in a general 



"Molten though Rigid." 121 

way resemble the lower stages of the taxonomic, or 
classification, series. All animal forms, starting from 
original germ-cells perhaps identical in character, must 
progress along parallel lines of development, and 
every now and then one or more forms stop develop- 
ing because they have reached maturity, while the 
others go on past this stage, until they also reach 
their perfect development. It could not well be 
otherwise. We could not imagine anything else, any 
more than we could construct a pyramid by building 
the apex first. But what "law" would be violated 
in this springtime of the world if, instead of twenty 
years or so for full development, the first man passed 
through all these stages in one day, — the sixth cf 
creation week? He might as well have originated 
from the not-living as the evolutionist's first speck 
of protoplasm, for he certainly now starts from a mass 
of this same protoplasm, identical, as we have seen, 
in all plants and animals. 

And by originating thus, he would escape that 
horrible heritage of bestial and savage propensities 
which he would get through evolution, a heritage 
that would make it not his fault, but his misfortune, 
that sin and evil are in the world, and which would 
also shift the responsibility for the evidently abnor- 
mal condition of "this present evil world" off from 
the creature to the Creator, and change to us His 
character from that of a loving Father, fettered by 
no conditions in His creation, to that of either a 
bungling, incompetent workman or a heartless fiend; 
for, though I am almost ashamed to write the words, 
the god of the evolutionist must be either the one 
or the other. 



122 Modern Christianity and Modern Science. 



i 



2 
W 



G 

8 



dS 



3 a 



|2 



£ 

13 
CO 

>^ 

CO 



O 



.G<G en 
u g 

• •» ... rt 
J2 en "o 

•o co ft 

IP 
SE-3 

CO 






■a 

2 2 



£-S 



.~ en 

in 

8-3 

e O 
S o 



iS o 



w tff W 



to en 

**"o 

cd ej 

« So 

cj s_i! 
* tn 
to M 

Sg 

u£ 

<o 

<o t! 

.3 > 



T3'i 



CO 

£ 2 
G-° 
Sig b» 

cn cu ^ 

J5 > "& 

CU c 

£j 

I—* I— I 



cn is ja tfl 

•§3-2 



£.2 



^GS e cn 
•- H ccS 

co-£ .2 & 

<w CO x P 
£,G CU is 






0) cd 
cn 
G 
CO 

s 
£ 



en .„ 
^ J3 
•a en 

a** 
cu -a 

*-> CU 

u O 



^ J2 € 



s & 
s ° 



c . 

cd G 

•J3 cd 

a *c 

<0 ,Q 

g S 

cd cd 

J U 



cn 

O 

• u 

S^g g 
S §.2 

| Cd £ 



y 

o 

CO 

3 

Ph 

o 

in 

CO 

S 



G 
O 

175 S 



cd 

Ph t3 



cn 

G 

• O 

U CO 

cn cd 

2 ? 



J£ G 



a 

03 

CU 

I 

G 
cd 

s 



cn 
u co _ 

° -Sen 

§ N q U 
8 to 

£ <! 



T3 

G . 

cd CO 

G u 

.2S 



N 


cn cn 


(J 


<0*G 




Vh cd 


"fti 


o B 


u 

o 


is y 


>1 


o-g 


Jh 


CO OJ 

bn 


CU 


< 



co-j3 

Vs . 

b , tn. 

C(3 CO CO 

.y Vh CO 

H &.cn 



T3 



I o 

CO 

^ G 

O cd 



. cn 
cd cj 



.5 J= .- en 
hJO o<£ to 

.a a^.s 

G S & .2 

?! 2 

T3 O 

G 



cu 
G 

biO ^ 
G ^O 

s s 

> -M 

Jn en 
i> O 
G Oh 



2 o 



o e 



cd 
G 



CHAPTER V. 

Geological Guessing. 

Geology has long been regarded as the one branch 
of natural science which could supply absolute facts 
in manifest contradiction to the Mosaic narrative. 
In astronomy and the other physical sciences the 
nebular hypothesis has always been only an hypoth- 
esis, by very many not taken at all seriously, though 
admired for its ingenuity, but acknowledged by all to 
be neither demonstrated nor demonstrable. 

In the fields of chemistry and biology again the 
evolutionists are getting decidedly discouraged. 
They have about given up the hope of accounting 
for the origin of life, or of consciousness, or of find- 
ing anywhere the real connections between the dif- 
ferent rounds in what they are pleased to term life's 
great ladder. The general results of the closer study 
of variation during recent years have all been quite 
disheartening, especially since Weismann has shown 
that acquired characteristics are not inherited, save 
possibly in the direction of degeneration. So that 
not only have they failed to get any conception of 
the causes or forces that are competent to bring a 
form of low degree up to a superior status of organ- 
ization or instinct, or that can "enable an ancestor 
to transmit to his posterity what he has not got iiim- 
self,' , but the enthusiasm with which the theory was 

(123) 



124 Modem Christianity and Modern Science. 

accepted and studied during the first twenty or thirty 
years of its existence has gradually died out, and 
thousands are acknowledging with sadness that the 
explanation it offers of "the riddle of the universe" 
does not really explain anything whatever. It is only 
"explaining" the unknown in terms of the unknown. 
The archaeologists indeed have of recent years 
come in with a tardy, and as yet only partial, vindi- 
cation of the story of Noah's flood. Man, they say, 
is not only of recent origin, but the discoveries in the 
various parts of western Europe have led such men 
as Dupont, Boyd Dawkins, Prestwich, and Dawson, 
with hosts of others, to the conclusion that primitive 
or palaeocosmic man disappeared "somewhat sud- 
denly" with the mammoth and the other associated 
mammals at the time of the "last great subsidence of 
western Europe;" and some, at least, of the above- 
mentioned standard authorities have been forced to 
the conclusion that the story of a great deluge, as 
described in the Chaldean Deluge Tablets, 1 and what 
Rawlinson calls the "consentient belief" of all the 



1 "It is reported that Pere Schiel has made a discovery of a clay 
tablet. To be sure, the record on the tablet does not amount to 
much, it is such a fragmentary bit; but it is large enough to make 
sure that the tablet contained the story of the Deluge; and, most 
fortunately, the most important of all is preserved, the colophon, 
with the date. 

"It is dated in the reign of Ammi-zaduga, king of Babylon (and 
we know that he reigned about 2140 b. c). That is, we have 
here a precious bit of clay, on which was written a poetical story 
of the Deluge, rive centuries before Moses and about the time of 
Isaac or Jacob. That is enough to make the discovery memora- 
ble. We learn positively that the story of the Deluge was familiar 
to the common people of Babylonia, and therefore of all the east, 
from Syria to Persia." — New York Independent, May, j8g8. 



Geological Guessing. 125 

great races of mankind, 2 to say nothing of Genesis, 
explains the ascertained facts in the case far better 
than any other hypothesis. 3 

In geology proper, however, it has for years been 
considered that they had positive evidence of the 
earth's being very much older than a plain, literal 
understanding of Genesis will allow us to believe. 
Geology has been the last great stronghold of anti- 
biblical science. It is safe to say that, without this 
part of the argument, the doctrine of evolution could 
never in fifty years have become practically universal, 
as it is to-day. Darwin would never have got a re- 
spectable hearing had not Agassiz and Lyell acted 
as his advance agents. 

The geologists, though, as I have shown in my 
first chapter, have grown somewhat reverent with 
the rest. The agnosticism that was so triumphant 
a quarter of a century ago, seems now to be fading 
away before "theistic evolution." But the plain 
Biblical Christian" can not help regarding their day- 
period theory of creation as anything else than a libel 
on Moses. To say that the days of creation men- 
tioned there were meant for long periods of time, 
corresponding to the geological epochs, is, as Dean 
Farrar remarks, only trifling with language. It not 
only strikes at the very basis of the Sabbath, but, by 
its forced and unnatural method of "interpretation," 
it has been the principal cause of the development 
of the "Higher Criticism," and that widespread dis- 



Vf 



3 "Introduction to Study of the Scriptures," chapter 26, p. 190. 
s See 'The Meeting-place of Geology and History," passim, by 
Sir J. W. Dawson. Fleming H. Revell Company, 1894. 



126 Modern Christianity and Modern Science, 

belief in the Bible as a real revelation of God to us 
of the twentieth century, which is eating at the very 
vitals of modern orthodox Protestantism. 

Supported by the strong_weight „of_such menjjs. 
Dawson and Dana, this day-period theory of crea- 
tion was once quite popular. But when Gladstone, in 
1885, undertook the same line of argument, Huxley 
showed that the supposed coincidence between the 
days of Genesis and the epochs of geology is pure 
fancy. Since then this "explanation" has somewhat 
subsided. But for over fifty years it has been prac- 
tically the only answer that faith has dared to give 
to the insistent questions of unbelieving scientists. 
The faltering accents of the old-fashioned few, who 
said that the shells on the mountain-tops were put 
there by Noah's flood, have grown fainter and faintei, 
till, outside of the scattered remnant, they have long 
since become inaudible. 

I know I must not ignore that other explanation, 
the "restitution" or "internal theory," proposed by 
Buckland, the first president of the British Associa- 
tion, and favored by Chalmers, Cardinal Wiseman, 
and other well-known scholars. This theory tries to 
show that all the geological changes (ante-glacial) be- 
long back in some previous state of the earth's ex- 
istence, before Gen. 1:3, and separated from the six 
literal days of our present creation by the condition 
described as "waste and void." Were it not for 
some of the illustrious names connected with it in the 
past, as well as the scores of well-meaning books that 
used to advocate this view, some of which are occa- 
sionally reappearing even now (I have one dated 1894 



Geological Guessing. l2 7 

and another 1899), it would scarcely be worth men- 
tioning. It had at least this splendid point about it, 
that it took the six days of creation as literal days of 
twenty-four hours each, which any common-sense 
reading of Moses' words must agree to be the mean- 
ing primarily intended by the author. But besides 
never having shown any moral purpose in all those 
countless ages of animal suffering and death before 
man came on the world at all, it has become more 
and more manifest to be at hopeless disagreement 
with some of the simplest facts concerning the sci- 
ence of fossil life, and has now even fewer defenders 
than the day-period theory, which has yet a certain 
vogue. How sad to see such dodging and twisting 
on the part of the Bible's professed defenders, instead 
of taking the record just as it reads, and assigning 
the great and striking geological changes to their 
most obvious cause, viz., the Noachian Deluge! 

It would seem that no one could give a clearer 
picture of present conditions than does Peter in his 
second epistle: "There shall come in the last days 
scoffers, walking after their own lusts, and saying, 
Where is the promise of His coming? for since the 
fathers fell asleep, all things continue as they were 
from the beginning of the creation," — uniformitari- 
anism, surely, and an utter disbelief in any "super- 
natural" event. "For this they willingly are igno- 
rant of [or "wilfully ignore"], that by the word of 
God the heavens were of old, and the earth standing 
out of the water and in the water; whereby the world 
that then was, being overflowed with water, perished ; 
but the heavens and the earth, which are now, by 



128 Modern Christianity and Modern Science. 

the same word are kept in store, reserved unto fire 
against the day of judgment and perdition of ungodly 
men." 4 

Here we have it plainly stated that one of the chief 
reasons why the people of what he calls "the last 
days" will not believe in the second coming of Christ 
and the destruction of the present conditions by fire, 
is because they have grown accustomed to disbeliev- 
ing the record of the Hood. He pictures them claim- 
ing that the phenomena of nature have been uniform 
with the present in all past time, and that, instead of 
the world growing old and nearing its dissolution, 
it is but entering on its golden age of peace and joy. 
The world, they say, has never experienced any 
great catastrophe in the past, and so we have no 
reason to believe that these alarmist reports of an 
approaching end of the present state of affairs are 
anything but moonshine. 

Most scientists have claimed with the utmost as- 
surance that geology was gradually filling up the 
missing links, which were not really missing in the 
chain of life, but only in our knowledge; though, if 
we take the evidence of some of their best men, it 
does not seem to have accomplished any such thing. 

"In tracing back animals and groups of animals in 
geological time, we rind that they always end with- 
out any link of connection with previous beings, and 
in circumstances which render any such connection 
improbable." 5 

"Palaeontology furnishes no direct evidence, per- 

4 2 Peter 3:3-7. 

5 Dawson, "Origin of the World," p. 226. 



Geological Guessing. 129 

haps never can furnish any, as to the actual transfor- 
mation of one species into another." 6 

"Upon no theory oLe volution can we find a satis- 
factory explanation for the constant introduction 
throughout geological time of new forms of life ; 
which do not appear to have been preceded by pre- 
cxistent allied types. The Graptolites and Trilobites 
have no known predecessors, and leave no known 
successors. The Insects appear suddenly in the 
Devonian, and the Arachnides and Myriapods in the 
Carboniferous, under well-differentiated and highly- 
specialized types. The Dibranchiate Cephalopods 
appear with equal apparent suddenness in the older 
Mesozoic deposits, and no known type of the Palae- 
ozoic period can be pointed to as a possible ancestor. 
The Hippuritidae of the Cretaceous burst into varied 
life to all appearance almost immediately after their 
first introduction into existence. The wonderful 
Dicotyledonous flora of the Upper Cretaceous pe- 
riod similarly surprises us without any prophetic an- 
nunciation from the older Jurassic." 7 

"From the geological record we obtain no help. 
The earliest traces of Angiosperms in rocks of the 
middle Mesozoic period enable us to say little regard- 
ing them, except that the fragments give evidence of 
an organization as complete as that possessed by the 
Angiosperms of the present day. The gap between 
the Angiosperms and other types of vegetation is a 
wide one, and no links are known." 8 



6 Id,, p. 372. 

7 "Ancient Life- History of the Earth," p. 3,73. 

8 Prof. I. Bayley Balfour, Pres. Section on Botany, British Asso- 
ciation, Glasgow, 1 901; Nature^ Oct. 3, 1901, p. 558. 

9 



130 Modern Christianity and Modern Science. 

In view of such facts, it is not surprising to find an 
out-and-out evolutionist like Professor Clodd ac- 
knowledging that "the fossil-yielding rocks supply no 
key to the origin of the leading groups." 9 

Also Huxley: "What, then, does an impartial sur- 
vey of the positively-ascertained truths of palaeon- 
tology testify in relation to the common doctrines of 
progressive modification, which suppose that modi- 
fication to have taken place by a necessary progress 
from more to less embryonic forms, or from more to 
less generalized types, within the limits of the period 
represented by the fossiliferous rocks? 

"It negatives those doctrines, for it either shows 
us no evidence of such modification, or demonstrates 
such modification as has occurred to have been very 
slight; and as to the nature of that modification, it 
yields no evidence whatever that the earlier members 
of any long-continued group were more generalized 
in structure than the later ones. . . . 

"Contrariwise, any admissible hypothesis of pro- 
gressive modification must be compatible with per- 
sistence without progression through indefinite pe- 
riods." 10 

All this, of course, is taking for granted, as sci- 
entists always do, that the current geology is a wit- 
ness competent to bear evidence in favor of evolution. 
It will be one of the objects of this chapter to show 
that the popular geology not only rests on very 
uncertain data, but that its supposed evidence in favor 



9 "The Story of Creation," by Professor Edw. Clodd, F. R. S., 
p. 94. 



10 < 



'Lay Sermons." 



Geological Guessing. 131 

of evolution should be ruled out of court on the 
ground of collusion between the witness and defend- 
ant; that it has assumed the main point which the 
evolution theory seeks to establish when it says, 
without a scintilla of evidence, that there has been 
a succession in the life upon the globe, beginning 
with the more rudimentary forms, and progressing 
through the Crustacea, reptiles, and mammals, up 
to man; in short, that geology does not, as is com- 
monly supposed, prove this succession, but only as- 
sumes it, and hence to quote geology in favor of Dar- 
winism, is but reasoning in a circle. 

So let us proceed to verify this charge of want of 
confidence, by examining some of the foundation 
facts and principles of this much-misunderstood 
branch of science. And I shall have to take for 
granted that my readers are more or less familiar 
with the study of the rock formations, else I could 
not, within the limits of this chapter, make my mean- 
ing plain. Those who are not very familiar with the 
subject would do well to make reference, as occasion 
may demand, to the table given at the first of this 
chapter. 

As is well known, almost every spot on the earth 
gives evidence of having once been under water. 
And the various water-formed rocks are termed 
"stratified," because laid down in strata or layers one 
above another. Great changes besides hardening 
have evidently taken place since they were deposited 
for we very often find these strata not horizontal 
as they were doubtless laid down, but bent and folded 
in a most astonishing manner. However, all the 



13 2 Modern Christianity and Modern Science. 

various stratified rocks can be divided into the dif- 
ferent kinds of sandstones, shales and slates, calcare- 
ous, and silicious rocks. This would be classifying 
them according to their mineral and mechanical 
composition. But varieties of nearly all these rocks 
can be found almost anywhere, and are found in more 
or less abundance in all the formations or systems, 
as they are called. These formations or sets of 
rocks, we are told, represent successive eras in the 
world's history. Of course, when we find one bed 
laid down above another, the lower one is evidently 
the older of the two; but whether laid doivn ten 
minutes earlier or ten million years earlier, the rocks 
do not inform us, except we assume the succession 
of life and answer the question according to the fos- 
sils they contain. 

Now these "sets," or "formations," are not found 
together in any one place, but some are "developed" 
in one country and some in another. Nor is a single 
"set," perhaps, perfectly developed in any one place. 
They may have to put together the rocks from half 
a dozen countries to make a set complete. And it 
is a very rare thing to find even parts of more than 
two or three of these sets of rocks so situated that 
on purely stratigraphical grounds one set could be 
said to be older than the other. And, of course, 
when it comes to comparing the rocks of one locality 
with those of another, distant only a few miles, the 
stratigraphical evidence is almost sure to fail us, and 
we are left to mechanical or mineral makeup, and 
the evidence of fossils or palaeontology. Indeed, 
disguise it as they may, the latter is the supreme test. 
In the words of Prof. H. Alleyne Nicholson: — 



Geological Guessing. 133 

"It may even be said that, in any case where there 
should appear to be a clear and decisive discordance 
between the physical and the palaeontological evi- 
dence as to the age of a given series of beds, it is the 
former that is to be distrusted rather than the latter/' 11 

But even this language is scarcely stronger than 
that of Professor Dana, when he seeks to show how 
the rocks can be brought, from various lands, "into 
order, so as to make a continuous history worthy 
of confidence. " "The case," he says, "would have 
been hopeless were it not for one branch of this his- 
tory, that relating to the progress of life;" 12 and then 
he goes on to describe how rocks are determined 
by their fossils. 

Let us see, then, how the evidence of fossils is 
used to tell the relative age. Suppose we have three 
sample sections of rocks, containing characteristic 
fossils, from three different parts of the world, say 
Quebec, England, and Northern Italy. The first, 
we are told, is plainly a Laurentian ; 13 a specimen of 



11 "Ancient Life-History of the Earth," p. 40. 

12 "Geological Story Briefly Told," p. 97. 

13 There are large areas of these Laurentian rocks, say in north- 
ern Canada, now at the surface, without any signs whatever of 
any of the subsequent ages upon their faces. If we ask why it is 
that throughout these vast areas we find no traces of the subse- 
quent millions of years — say of the plants of the Carboniferous 
age, which Huxley calculated at six million years, or of the im- 
mense reptiles of the Triassic — the answer we usually get is, I 
think, that ever since they were deposited these Laurentian rocks 
have been above the sea and in stable equilibrium, and, as all 
the stratified rocks are laid down in water, we now find no other 
deposits above them. Certainly, if they had been below the sea 



134 Modern Christianity and Modern Science. 

the famous Eozoon is very plainly shown on its sur- 
face. It is one of the very oldest rocks in the world. 
It was laid down, they tell us, so many millions of 
years ago that the mind fails to grasp any idea as to 
time, and is only concerned with the number of 
naughts after the digit. The second, however, is 
immeasurably younger. This piece of one of those 
large ammonites shows that it belongs to the Cre- 
taceous system, which, as Winchell says, seems "to 
have been a literal oyster cemetery." But the third 
is comparatively modern; it belongs to one of the sys- 
tems of the Tertiary age, perhaps to the Pliocene, the 
last before the great ice age, for here is a piece of 
lignite, or brown coal, composed partly of modern 
species of plants. 

We begin to understand Wordsworth's remark to 
Professor Sedgwick: "O professor," said he, "I begin 
to like your geological studies very much; there is so 
much imagination in them!" With mingled wonder 
and awe we ask our sages how they can tell so much 
from three pieces of rock. The answer we get is just 
this, The age of a rock is told almost entirely by the 
fossils it contains; the oldest rocks are those contain- 
ing the oldest fossils. But how do we know that 



they would have fared like the other rocks. On the other hand, 
they think that if elevated above the water ever since, we ought 
not to expect to find any traces of the succeeding forms of life. 
But is this really credible ? On the contrary, it seems little short 
of a preposterous argument. Or if they say that such traces of 
subsequent life as they must once have had have since been 
washed off, I would reply in their own favorite language that 
they are invoking ' 'forces and processes which we can in no way 
account for." 



Geological Guessing. 13$ 

they are really the oldest fossils? — Because they are 
simpler, or further down in the scale of life. When 
pressed to tell why they think there has been a suc- 
cession, if not a gradual development, in the order 
of life on the globe, as such an answer implies, they 
say that they infer that such has been the case, be- 
cause, in any given vertical section of beds, the lower 
strata always contain simpler types of fossils than the 
upper, and never the reverse. "They then extend 
this conclusion to formations that are very far apart, 
and, although they can not show, by the method of 
superposition, their relative ages, they agree that those 
whose fossils are of the lowest type are the oldest." 14 
The various rocks over the world that have similar 
groups of fossils are then classed together into a set 
or formation, and fitted into their appropriate place 
in this great hypothetical ladder of life, until age is 
piled on age, and we have such absurdities as about 
twenty-five miles total thickness of strata, and a "pul- 
sating crust" 15 to account for the way these fossils 
are distributed over the world and to excuse their 
crazy-quilt geological maps, with a "rotation of cli- 
mates" 16 to help them out of their dilemmas when 
everything else fails. 

Of course, right in this connection they bring in 
the method of comparison, as taught by Agassiz. 
The idea of a succession in the life upon the globe 
was originated long before him, but Agassiz was the 



14 From a private letter to the author from one of the best-known 
teachers of science in eastern Canada. 

15 Dawson. 
16 J. Geikie. 



136 Modern Christianity and Modern Science. 

first to teach that the embryonic development of the 
individual furnishes the key to the geological suc- 
cession; not that he claimed, as modern biologists 
do, that the embryonic development is but "a brief 
recapitulation, as it were from memory/' of the past 
history of the species. He did not admit evolution. 
He would not admit any causal relation of the geo- 
logical succession to the embryonic. The relation 
between the two was with him an intellectual, not 
a natural or physical, one. But he started the idea, 
and his followers have carried it out to its logical 
conclusions. 

But when with sober reason we begin to examine 
this idea, and to weigh it as evidence in favor of there 
actually having been such a succession of life on the 
globe, we see at a glance that the whole thing is pure 
fancy and moonshine. It is, of course, true that the 
successive stages by which an ovum is developed into 
an individual of one of the higher animals resembles, 
in a rough, general way, the geological succession 
of life that they have invented, and also the various 
stages of increasing complexity in the classification 
series that we have now in the world before our eyes. 
Though in very many cases, even from their stand- 
point, the individual development can not be a repeti- 
tion of the ancestral, and so Haeckel says we must re- 
ject them as "spurious additions to the record" (sic). 
Also the embryo has in almost every form a stub- 
born fashion of bringing to light evidences of degra- 
dation and degeneracy, that do not fit in with their 
theories. However, there is no doubt that the hu- 
man embryo, for instance, passes through stages that 



Geological Guessing. 137 

in a general way resemble the developing, or even 
the mature, conditions of some of the lower forms. 
But I ask in all seriousness, How could it be other- 
wise? How could the higher condition of structure 
be reached except by passing through the lower and 
intermediate stages? The higher forms differ from 
the lower mainly in having what the lower forms 
have plus something else. For this reason, and for 
this alone, the successive stages in embryonic devel- 
opment must in a rough way resemble the lower 
stages of the taxonomic, or classification, series. It 
could not possibly be otherwise. Should we expect 
the brain to develop before the nutritive system, or 
the limbs to grow before the spinal column? We 
might as well try to imagine the Egyptians' building 
the apex of one of their pyramids first, and after- 
wards the foundation, or expect to see a modern car- 
penter build the roof of his house first. No, in the 
name of common sense do not tell us that the em- 
bryonic development is even collateral evidence that 
there has been a succession in the life upon the globe. 
We thus see that the skeleton, the outline, of the 
whole evolution theory is quietly assumed at the very 
beginning of our work in geology. Assumed, I say, 
for it is nothing but a pure assumption. What else 
can you call such an inference from this microscopic, 
this visionary, data? An inference based on a series 
of inferences?— No ; it is nothing but a pure assump- 
tion, utterly incapable of any rational proof, and is, as 
can be readily seen, just the skeleton of the evolution 
theory. When Lyell, in 1830, began his work of 
preaching a uniform action of the elements during an 



13& Modern Christianity and Modern Science. 

indefinite past time, with a crust rising and falling 
at his convenience; and when, a few years later, 
Agassiz brought forward his "method of compari- 
son'' and his three famous "laws" of development, 
they were but the advance agents of Darwin, Spencer, 
Haeckel & Co., and their modern troupe playing at 
dethroning the Creator. And after Dana and Daw- 
son had worked up a strong interest among the 
church people with their day-period theory of cre- 
ation, we see the whole worTcT crowding to the per- 
formance and applauding their work to the echo. 

They sometimes say that the rocky records can 
not be made to tell a coherent story in any other 
manner than by this succession-of-life idea, and hav- 
ing the fossil witnesses give their evidence one after 
another in single file. But the whole arrangement 
seems to be an organized conspiracy of evil to cover 
up the real story that they tell if allowed to testify 
in concert, viz., that Moses' account of the Deluge 
is no myth, but inspired history. 

Remembering, then, that the geological succession 
of life is merely the skeleton of the evolution theory, 
assumed as a "working hypothesis" as long as it will 
work; and that, from the Biblical standpoint, this 
same succession of life is just the taxonomic, or clas- 
sification, series, a cross-section if you will, in the life 
of the antediluvian world, we begin to get our 
bearings concerning these two possible explanations 
of the facts as told by the fossils. They are welcome 
to try their theory and see if it will work, i. e., see 
if it will explain a fair share of the ascertained facts 
in the case, and in addition show that no other the- 



Geological Guessing. 139 

ory will explain them. But when they can only as- 
sume that there has been such a succession of life, 
and then take this cross-section in the fossil life, 
stand it on its little end, and walk it in as evidence 
in favor of Darwinism, we demur. They are only 
begging the question to be proved, trying to prove 
the truth of their own major premise. They might 
as well try to lift themselves by pulling at the tops of 
their boots. 

This reminds me very much of Spencer's peculiar 
style of reasoning referred to in the first chapter, 
"Before it can be ascertained how organized beings 
have been gradually evolved, there must be reached 
the conviction that they have been gradually 
evolved." 17 That is to say, First formulate your 
theory, and have a firm conviction of its truth. Then 
investigate the matter, and marshal the facts so as 
to support your theory. He then goes on to say that 
the evolution of organisms is only a part of the great 
whole of evolution in general. We must first assure 
ourselves that evolution is a settled truth in the other 
departments of nature, and furnishes the true expla- 
nation of all their phenomena. When we have 
grasped this, we then have the conviction necessary 
to be acquired before we examine the phenomena 
of life; and then we can make the investigation nec- 
essary to reconcile the facts with these supposed laws 
of matter and motion. "Only when the process of 
evolution of organisms is affiliated on the process of 
evolution in general can it be truly said to be ex- 
plained. The thing required is to show that its vari- 

17 "Biology," I, p. 408. 



140 Modern Christianity and Modern Science. 

cms results are corollaries from first principles. We 
have to reconcile the facts with the universal laws of 
the redistribution of matter and motion." 18 

And I suppose if any of the facts stubbornly re- 
fuse to be reconciled, "so much the worse for the 
facts." What a hopeless task it would be to answer 
such reasoning as this! 

Did our scientists never hear of that maxim of 
the law of evidence , that every fact in a chain of 
proofs "must be proved independently by direct evi- 
dence, and must not be itself a deduction from some 
other fact," or, in other words, that you can not 
draw an inference from an inference? Or did they 
never hear of that other equally-important rule of 
evidence which says that "the collection of facts from 
which an inference is to be drawn must not only be 
consistent with the probable truth of that inference, 
but they must exclude the probable truth of any other 
inference"? But what are we to think of this shame- 
less collusion between the witnesses in this case of 
evolution? For Agassis proved his geological suc- 
cession in time by comparison with the embryonic 
life of the individual; and then Spencer, and espe- 
cially Haeckel, prove their theory of evolution by 
showing that the embryonic life of the individual is 
only a brief recapitulation, by memory as it were, of 
the geological succession in time. And then they call 
us stubborn or ignorant because we refuse to such 
hocus-pocus the name of science. 

But the church has so long — a century, or nearly, 



18 "Biology," I, pp. 409, 410. D. Appleton & Company, 1881. 



Geological Guessing. 14 l 

if we count from Cuvier and his four epochs of 
creation — swallowed this skeleton of the evolution 
theory that the average work on geology does not 
even try to sugar-coat the idea to make it palatable. 
One might read a dozen of the smaller works on 
geology or palaeontology without finding so much 
as a sentence of supporting argument, except this 
strange whirligig that embryology furnishes the key 
to the geological succession; and so geology proves 
evolution. But the matter-of-course way in which 
this succession of life, and the almost unlimited time 
necessarily implied, are assumed as the past history 
of our globe, seems to come upon every student of 
the subject with such benumbing and overwhelming 
weight that faith and reason are alike silenced by 
the very hypnotism of the idea, until he is almost 
forced to the conclusion that it must be so. The 
young student thinks that reliable authorities have 
proved it; after entertaining the idea for a while, it 
becomes a part of his being; and then, if there has 
actually been this succession, how can he escape the 
conclusions of evolution? 

Then there is that other line of thought, by which 
our reason is tricked into supposing that science has 
proved the uniform action of the elements during all 
past time. 

Science, they say, though busy with classifying the 
objects and phenomena about us, must concern her- 
self with secondary causes at least. We may not be 
able to get at ultimate causes through the scientific 
method, as all acknowledge we can not, but the sec- 
ondary causes, that they always put up as a veil to 



H 2 Modem Christianity and Modem Science. 

hide them from the dazzling brightness of the 
Divine Immanence, are in all cases assumed to be 
themselves competent causes, at least until some more 
reasonable "cause" is discovered; so that the mind 
gets familiarized with the absurdity that all the con- 
tradictory forces and "properties" displayed in nature 
inhere in matter itself; that matter has in itself the 
"promise and potency" of all phenomena. We have 
already shown elsewhere that this is a question not 
for science to solve, but for philosophy, and that, 
before reaching this pantheistic horror of material- 
ism, some unscientific method has come in some- 
where; we have, without noticing it, slipped across 
the border-line between science and philosophy, and 
have landed at a conclusion utterly contrary to 
sound philosophy. But having reached this material- 
istic conception of nature, with our eyes on matter in- 
stead of the Intelligence behind it, the rest is very easy. 
Thus, we may observe how matter acts now under 
given conditions; then we reason that it must always 
act thus. Another step and we reach Huxley's fixed 
postulate of the eternal uniformity of nature, that the 
Infinite Power never acts, or never has acted, in any 
way different from what we have been able to dis- 
cover of the established order of things; hence, there 
never has been any "interruption" of the present 
regular order; and consequently such a story as that 
of a universal flood destroying all the existing life 
upon the globe is an utter absurdity, and not worth 
a moment's consideration. Even the Christian so far 
forgets his Bible as to admit this absolute "uniform- 
ity" of nature during the past history of our globe; 




Geological Guessing. 143 

and then the gradual introduction of life on the globe, 
a "creation" prolonged over a few million years by 
the process of evolution, seems to have a dazzling 
attractiveness as an "explanation" of all phenomena. 
He forgets the dozen or so pure assumptions — every 
one of them anti-biblical — necessary to reach such a 
position, and lets his mind dwell on such a trivial and 
perplexing problem as whether a species would vary 
enough in a few million years to produce a real new 
species. 

The history of this succession-of-life idea, as one 
of the parts of the now all-supreme evolution, is 
surely one of the strangest records of the slow- 
marching years. It came in when the late century jzjc/^y 
was very young, if, indeed, the germs of it did not /7^_j^l 
come over from the preceding one, long before any 
of Darwin's books 19 had been given to the world. 
The modern "gospel of despair," as taught by 
Spencer and Haeckel, would never have been pos- 
sible without Darwin; Darwin would never have got 
a more respectable hearing than did Lamarck 
(1744- 1 829), the contemporary of La Place (1749- 
1827), save for Agassiz (1807- 1873), with his three 
"laws" of comparison and his geological succession 
of life; and the latter would not have been possible 
without Lyell (1797- 1875) an( ^ his uniformitarian- 
ism. Indeed, we can trace the main outline of this 
idea of a succession clear back to Cuvier (1769-1832) 
and his four epochs of creation; and an indispensable 

preliminary of it even to Leibnitz (1646- 171 6) and ( 



19 "The Origin of Species," 1859; "The Descent of Man," 1871. 



144 Modem Christianity and Modern Science. 

his cooling globe. Then, what is the use of talking 
about the origin of species, if every preceding step 
in the argument is, if possible, even more anti- 
christian? There certainly seems something super- 
human — diabolical, most of my readers will say — in 
the unsuspected way in which this great unbiblical 
and unscientific delusion has fastened itself upon the 
world. But almost equally astonishing is the phe- 
nomenon of such men of faith, such opponents of 
evolution as Dana and Dawson, not being able tc 
see that, in their beloved geology, they had alreadv 
swallowed the skeleton of the evolution theory, and 
were in the last degree inconsistent in refusing its 
flesh and blood, as dressed and served up by their 
comrades in science. It was, no doubt, the result 
of early education, for each of these men was well 
along in his geological work before Darwin's time. 
Tliey refused to go any further on such a road (at 
leastTDawson did), though the habits of years had 
fastened them Avhere they were. As for the modern 
geologists, who, of course, are all ardent evolutionists, 
the false logic of their argument seems never to have 
occurred to them. Had they ever dreamed that sober 
men would or could question this succession of life, it 
is incredible that reason-loving men would ever ex- 
hibit themselves before the public for such acrobats 
in logic as seeking to prove the truth of their own 
major premise; in other words, they would never 
dream of quoting us geology in favor of evolution. 
But what would be the fate of evolution even now 
without this spectral support of geology? What, for 
instance, would Haeckel's argument be worth with- 
out this supposed bed-rock truth of phylogenesis? 



Geological Guessing. 145 

Of course, there are many things in geology which 
it would seem must have required a vast lapse of time 
for their accomplishment, at least if we adopt their 
other utterly anti-Biblical assumption of a uniform ac- 
tion of the elements during all past time; not uniform 
with the present, it is true, for they require a "pul- 
sating crust," rising and falling like the top of a bel- 
lows, and our historic experience has not furnished 
us with any proof of such pulsating action as their 
theory requires. Our crust is now certainly very 
stable compared with the "mobile" nature it has 
shown during all past time, according to the "uni- 
formitarians," such few changes as history informs 
us of being decidedly spasmodic and abrupt, and, as 
we have already shown in chapter four, 20 undoubtedly 
due to the very local causes connected with earth- 
quakes and volcanoes. And this assumption of a 
"uniform" action of the elements during all past time, 
be it remembered, is a point-blank denial of the record 
of the flood. "It is a question of energy versus time," 
as Professor Nicholson says. "We may, on the one 
hand, suppose them [the geological phenomena] 



20 To show that in thus denying any systematic gradual rise or 
fall of continents I am not entirely alone, let me present the fol- 
lowing from Sir Roderick Murchison, one of the most illustrious 
names in geology: — 

"The case therefore stands thus. The shelly and pebbly ter- 
races which exist are signs of sudden elevation at different peri- 
ods; whilst the theory of modern gradual elevation and depres- 
sion is still wanting in any valid proof that such operations have 
taken place except within very limited areas." "Siluria "pp. 
490, 491, fifth edition, 1872, Italics supplied. 
10 



146 Modern Christianity and Modern Science. 

to be the result of some very powerful cause, acting 
through a short period of time. Or we may suppose 
them to be caused by a much weaker force operating 
through a proportionately prolonged period." And 
as scientists always consider it their business to push 
the real first cause of anything back as far as possi- 
ble, time will always receive the verdict when op- 
posed to energy. 

But no one can study such examples as the gorge 
of the Niagara 21 or the canyon of the Colorado, and 
fail to be impressed with awe as he tries to estimate 
the length of time since the water first began to wear 
away those adamantine surfaces, if the rocks were 
in their present hardened condition when the work 
of erosion began. Of course, with their uniformi- 
tarian theory, they can never suppose that the action 



21 1 believe that Desor, the Swiss geologist, estimated the rate of 
recession of the falls as not more than one foot a century. This 
would carry the date of the beginning of their action on the rocks 
back about three million five hundred thousand years. Lyell 
made the maximum rate of erosion about one foot per annum, 
and thus the beginning of the falls would be about thirty-five 
thousand years ago. Bakewell and others have made them re- 
treat about two or three feet a year. Lately, however, Mr. G. K. 
Gilbert, of the U. S. Geological Survey, and Mr. R. S. Wood- 
ward, of Washington, as the result of very careful work, fixed the 
average rate of recession at five feet per annum. Hence, Mr. 
Gilbert, who is certainly a competent authority, says that the 
"maximum length of time since the birth of the falls by the sepa- 
ration of the lakes is only seven thousand years, and that even 
this small measure may need significant reduction." Sir William 
Dawson gives about the same short time in his "Meeting- Place," 
quoted elsewhere. Many others of the "natural chronometers' 
have had their records similarly revised. 



Geological Guessing. 147 

of the elements upon the rocks in these and other 
places might possibly have begun while the rocky 
mould was soft and freshly laid. But this, we have 
seen, is the true Biblical standpoint, and would make 
the case very different. A few thousand years, be- 
ginning with the sedimentary deposits all freshly 
laid, would seem amply sufficient to account for the 
most striking instances of erosion by rain, wave, or 
current. It would probably take several centuries 
for the mass to harden into anything like its present 
consistence. At any rate, every argument that tends 
to shorten the time required for its hardening will 
tend just so far to answer the only objection 22 that 
occurs to me against such a view. And, in the mean- 



22 "I have in my collection a curious specimen illustrative of the 
transition from the stone to the iron period. It was found at 
Merigomish Harbor, an old place of residence of one of the 
eastern Micmac tribes. It consists of a mass of hard ferruginous 
sandstone, which was found at some depth in the ground, 
wrapped carefully in beaver skins, the fur of which is still well 
preserved. The mass, when broken, was found to be full of 
blades of iron knives or daggers, mixed with black and white 
beads and bugles, among which were traces of basket-work or 
matting and a cylindrical iron awl or bodkin. The iron instru- 
ments had been completely oxidized, and had furnished the 
cementing material of the mass; and their wooden handles had 
been perfectly petrified or converted into a hard, fibrous, brown 
limonite, still retaining the structure of the wood. The deposit 
was probably a 'cache,' or hiding-place, of valuable booty of the 
French and Indian Wars, and serves, among other things, to 
show the comparatively perishable character of iron implements 
as compared with those of stone, and the short space of time 
which under certain circumstances may give to modern objects 
the aspect of hoar antiquity" — Acadian Geology, p. 45, by Sir 
J. W. Dawson, 1878. 



148 Modern Christianity and Modern Science. 

time, the wear by the action of the elements would 
be a thousand-fold more rapid than at present; and 
the Mosaic narrative, which gives the age of all these 
fossil-bearing deposits as about four to five thousand 
years, is perfectly credible. 

There are other phenomena also which they appeal 
to as demanding vast ages of time, such as suc- 
cessive deposits of limestone superimposed one 
above another, but separated by other strata of a dif- 
ferent character, indicating very changed conditions 
of deposition. It is, of course, out of the question 
that in the ten months or so that the waters of the 
flood were over the land, two such successive beds 
of limestone could have been built up in the orthodox 
geological way, viz., by the slow growth of corals, 
or by the accumulation of nummulites or other shells 
where the animals lived and died. But, again "it is 
a case of energy versus time," for it would be idle 
to deny that, if the bottoms of those antediluvian 
seas were more or less covered with calcareous ooze, 
such as we now find on every ocean floor, it might 
not easily be washed up over the previously and sub- 
sequently dry land, and be now represented by vast 
Joeds of limestone, perhaps even crystalline through 
■ subsequent change. This idea would also explain 
that common puzzle of geologists, viz., how the 
various land forms got mixed up with the deep-sea 
limestone, as we frequently find they have been. It 
would seem that it might even explain the coral 
limestones, which they so positively declare must all 
have grown up where they are. On this point I must 
confess ignorance of what has actually been disco v~ 



i 



Geological Guessing. 149 

ered. The evidence in favor of growth in situ, as 
they say, may be stronger than I am at present aware 
of, though I suspect that, like the case of the coal 
beds, next to be considered, they are only reading 
into the evidence their own foregone conclusions. 

At any rate, in thousands of limestones containing 
shell-fish we have quite satisfactory evidence that 
the death of the animals was sudden, or, in other 
words, that they were literally buried alive; for in 
the case of most bivalves the hinge at the back makes 
the shell gape open when the animal dies. Conse- 
quently, when we find a limestone several feet thick 
composed of such shells quite generally closed and 
hollow, i. e., not filled with sand or mud, it is positive 
proof that this is no ordinary bed of shells slowly 
built up in the orthodox way, but, on the contrary, 
that these animals were entombed as we find them, 
and before life was extinct, by some sudden action of 
the water. Also, in the case of such "lamp-shells'' 
as Spirifera and Athyris, whose valves do not thus 
open when dead, there is after death a hole or notch 
in the hinge, which would admit sand or mud if the 
shells were exposed to disturbance after the animals 
died; but as such shells, throughout Nova Scotia at 
any rate, perhaps in other countries, "are usually 
found with the valves closed and the interior often 
hollow," 2 * it seems quite plain that here also we have 



23 Dawson's "Acadian Geology, w p. 260. The ordinary text- 
books generally neglect to mention such facts, as if they were 
unimportant, and so, although these shells are found practically 
throughout the whole world in all the "older" rocks, I can not 
affirm that they are always found in this telltale condition in 
other countries. 



15° Modern Christianity and Modern Science. 

no ordinary conditions of deposit, but the results of 
some sudden marine disturbance which buried these 
animals alive. To this also might be added those 
cases not uncommon where species of different sorts 
are all mixed up together in "admirable confusion," 
shells from deep water being mixed with kinds found 
only near the shore in shallow water, and shells that 
live attached to rocks, such as barnacles, and those 
found singly in the sand, being mixed up with others 
which only occur gregariously in beds. In all these 
cases it seems absolutely certain that these shells did 
not and could not live as we find them, but that their 
present anomalous situation is due to some uncommon 
disturbance of the waters in which they lived. Hence 
we may be excused if we hesitate a little before ac- 
cepting all that is said about the coral limestones 
having grown where we find them, though, even if we 
admitted it in some cases, it might only prove that a 
former arm of the sea has now become elevated into 
dry land. 

The great beds of coal, which almost staggered 
Huxley with their evidence of the Calvinism of 
"thrifty nature," have furnished the stock arguments 
to prove the vast length of time that life has been upon 
our globe. At the South Joggins, Nova Scotia, they 
have found as many as seventy-six successive seams, 
laid down one after the other, each of which has its 
"underclay," varying in thickness from a few inches 
to several feet, and containing what seem to be the 
roots of the plants in the beds above. They point 
to these and other like phenomena as evidence that 
all the plants forming this coal grew where we find 



Geological Guessing. 151 

them; and they grow eloquent in describing the ages 
necessary for enough peat-like deposits to accumu- 
late to form even one of these seams. When, how- 
ever, this is complete, they souse the whole country 
under water and arrange for the deposit of enough 
soil to form a new "underclay." Then their "pul- 
sating crust" rises again at their bidding, and the 
same course is repeated, "till the heart is sick, and 
the brain benumbed," trying to grasp some idea of 
the length of time required for this one era of the 
geological past. 

Now, I do not claim to have gone into this sub- 
ject exhaustively. I am not a geologist. But I have 
gone through the evidences as given in one of the 
standard works on this particular point — Dawson's 
"Acadian Geology" — and I must say that the evi- 
dence there given of the coal plants having grown 
where we find them is of the most vague and fanciful 
character, very little more, in fact, than that many 
of the stumps of the trees appear upright as in nature, 
and that the "underclay s" have what seem like the 
roots of the plants in the beds above; though I fail to 
see how an "underclay," sometimes only one or two 
inches deep, could grow such enormous trees. How- 
ever, as stumps of trees with large quantities of the 
roots attached will generally float with the stems 
pointing more or less upward, this evidence is, to say 
the very least, utterly insufficient to prove his point, 
while any one who wills may read enough between 
the lines to show that dozens of their puzzling prob- 
lems, as well as all the ordinary facts, are much better 
explained by the Biblical story of the Deluge than by 




152 Modern Christianity and Modern Science. 

their "pulsating crust," no matter how accommodat- 
ing it may be. 24 

These three phenomena, — the erosive action of the 
elements, the formation of limestone, and of coal, — 
are -the principal, though perhaps not the only, argu- 
ments usually advanced to prove the almost unlimited 
character of geological time. When these and all 
other similar arguments are seen to be utterly insuf- 
ficient for their purpose, providing, of course, the 
tremendous turmoil of the Deluge be admitted for 
consideration, what becomes of the long vistas opened 
up to our minds by the fertile imaginations of the 
teachers of this modern science? — Why, absolutely 
nothing remains but their classification series, their 
cross-section, in the life of the antediluvian world. 



24 As a further objection to the popular idea that coal was formed 
by the accumulated deposits of immense peat-bogs being buried 
by a slow subsidence of the land, I would present the well- 
preserved character of these plant-forms themselves. Our ordi- 
nary coal often shows, with marvelous minuteness, the cellular 
structure of the wood and even the most intricate veining of the 
leaves. But the "Tertiary" coals of northern Greenland, con- 
taining as they do the remains of oaks, maples, walnuts, limes, 
magnolias, grapevines, and other subtropical species, also pre- 
serve the most delicate forms of the leaves, and even the fruits 
and the petals of the flowers sufficiently plain for identification. 
How could such things have lain for centuries in a peat-bog? 
For these facts see Nicholson's "Ancient Life-History of the 
Earth," pp. 309, 310. 

See also pages 311, 312, where he says that a certain butterfly 
{Vanessa pluto) is found in the Brown Coals of Croatia that "even 
exhibits the pattern of the wing and to some extent its original 
coloration; while the more durably-constructed insects are often in 
a state of exquisite preservation." Any other standard work will 
give similar statements. 



Geological Guessing. 153 

Geological time may seem to have been very long, 
if you will not believe Genesis, but even then the 
modern fashionable custom of piling the dozen odd 
formations one on top of another has absolutely noth- 
ing at all to do with it, until they first prove, by other 
and entirely independent arguments, that there has 
been such a succession of life on the globe. But I 
ask with all seriousness, How will they go to work 
to really prove such a thing? They probably will 
not have the time. This scheme of life succession 
may seem to fit beautifully into a theory of universal 
evolution, and the arguments of Darwin might in- 
deed pass current for whatever they are worth as 
evidence in favor of this premise of geology, but_to__ 
ask_u s to listen to geology in fav rQ£_qt evolution is 
an insult to our common sense. As the great con- 
troversialist, Cardinal Newman, used to say, "There 
is no touching you, if you first assume your premises, 
and then prove them by means of your conclusion." 






CHAPTER VI. 

Biblical Geology. 

Having shown the utterly fanciful foundation on 
which this pretentious system of evolutionary geol- 
ogy is built, we may now consider the truly Biblical 
science, which tells us of the one and only catastrophe 
that has ever befallen our world as a whole, namely, 
the flood of Noah. But modern skeptical criticism 
has thrown so much discredit on the Mosaic narra- 
tive that thousands of otherwise well-informed per- 
sons seem densely ignorant of what it really teaches 
concerning the Deluge and the antediluvian world. 
Hence it may not be out of place, before passing to 
the physical results of such an event, to call to mind 
the facts that are directly stated or implied in the 
first eight chapters of Genesis. I regret that my 
limited space will not allow me to give quotations 
for all my statements, and can only hope that my 
readers are sufficiently familiar with the record to call 
to mind the words there used, the spirit and teach- 
ing of which I shall strive to neither pervert nor ex- 
ceed. 

The earth, as Adam first saw it, was supremely 
beautiful. No bare, rocky cliffs towered up between 
him and the sunlight, frowning destruction upon his 
feeble steps; no wide, dreary swamps breathed pes- 
tilential vapors into his Eden home; no pathless 

154) 



& 



Biblical Geology. 1 5 5 

deserts intervened between him and distant lands. 
Flower and fruit and seed were produced in limitless 
profusion, and in almost endless variety. The ele- 
ments continued to minister to his wants, without 
terrifying him by any violent or irregular action. 
For sixteen lon g centurie s no torrents of water de- 
scended from those cloudless skies upon the shelter- 
less heads of the infant race; but "there went up a 
mist from the earth, and watered the whole face of 
the ground." 1 Even the mild, soft climate, of singu- 
lar uniformity over all the earth, north and south, 
was little changed after the expulsion from Eden, 
until that awful time when "all the fountains of the 
great deep" were "broken up, and the windows of 
heaven were opened," 2 and a third dreadful curse 
rested upon the earth as the result of sin. 

Again, we know that no single animal form in air 
or water was in the beginning formed to live at the 
expense of its fellows' lives. Carnivorous instincts 
were not an original endowment, but came in as a 
sympathetic result of man's sin. Death in even the 
animal creation is only the "wages of sin." "To 
every beast of the earth, and to every fowl of the air, 
and to everything that creepeth upon the earth, 
wherein there is life, I have given every green herb 
for meat." 3 Scientists may, if they will, prove great 

1 Genesis 2:6; see also chapter 9:13, and Hebrews 11:7, where 
we are told that Noah was warned of "things not seen as yet." 

2 Genesis 7:11. 

3 Genesis 1:30. The animal is broadly distinguished from the 
plant "by inability to convert inorganic into organic matter." 
The plant is then an indispensable medium or transition stage 
from the earthy to the animal. See how beautifully this modern 
scientific fact was expressed nearly three thousand years ago. 
Ps. 104:14. 



156 Modern Christianity and Modern Science. 

physiological changes in the structure and instincts 
of the animal creation since that happy beginning, 
amounting in some cases almost to a transmutation 
of species, but these changes, I believe, have been 
ever in the direction of degeneration, not develop- 
ment, as will appear later. 

Until the "waters of Noah" blotted out that ancient 
world, and embalmed fragments of its life to minister 
to our modern wants, or to convince us that all cre- 
ation is to-day sadly degenerate in symmetry as in 
size, the two-fold curse had not served to materially 
change the physical aspect of the world. There were 
evident tokens of decay; the climate was more vari- 
able, the animals had grown bloodthirsty, and all 
nature had grown accustomed to the enemy death. 

Upon such a world, trusting in an "observed uni- 
formity of nature" that we can scarcely imagine, 
came, like a blast of utter extinction, the stupendous 
changes of the flood. Through some astronomical 
or other causes which we may never fathom, the nice 
balance of the elements was disturbed, and air and 
earth were alike violently convulsed. The skies, 
which never before had condensed into falling drops, 
now grew black with universal cloudbursts, and the 
beds of the ocean, and the interior reservoirs of the 
earth, lost their equilibrium, and vomited forth their 
waters upon the sinking land. For five long months 
did this frightful state of disaster continue, until "all 
the high hills, that were under the whole heaven, were 
covered, . . . and the mountains were cov- 
ered." 4 "All flesh died that moved upon the earth, 

* Genesis 7:19, 20. 



Biblical Geology. 157 

. . . and every living substance was destroyed 
which was upon the face of the ground." 5 Not until 
the twent}^-seventh day of the second month of the 
next year, or a year and ten days, was the district of 
Armenia sufficiently dry to receive Noah and his 
family ; 6 and it is reasonable to infer that a very much 
longer time was necessary to place the land and water 
in their present relative position, which is perhaps 
quite different from the original arrangement, there 
being now doubtless a far larger proportion of water 
surface. Submerged forests are found in almost every 
part of the world, as, for example, the Mediterranean, 
the North Sea, and the Bay of Fundy; while raised 
beaches, now high and dry, and almost as widely 
distributed, show that, as David says, the waters 
once "stood above the mountains." 7 The first of 
these facts seems to show that there is now far more 
water over the earth's surface than formerly, and the 
second that the waters subsided to their present 
boundaries somewhat gradually. 

Just how this great event came about, we know 
not. Were I so disposed, I might speculate as to 
how such an event might have occurred, either by 
a sudden shifting of the earth's axis, or some other 
cause which would chill and condense the water vapor 
in the atmosphere, and send the waters already on the 
earth careering over the land. But such remarks 
would be only speculation, and very probably far 
short of the truth, or even an actual perversion of it. 



5 Genesis 7:21-23. 

6 Genesis 8:13-19. 
T Psalms 104:6. 



158 Modern Christianity and Modern Science. 

We have had enough of speculation. I prefer to 
confine myself to what we actually know, either from 
revelation or from nature, and to show the harmoni- 
ous story of the two. The real geological proofs of 
this harmony will be found a little further on. 

There remains only one more point expressly 
stated in Genesis, viz., that one of the means employed 
in drying up the waters was "a wind," which was 
caused to pass over the earth. 8 Two reasons at once 
present themselves for inferring that this wind was no 
ordinary affair. The first is that Inspiration has seen 
fit to give us a record of it. No ordinary storm, or 
one not nearly as universal as the waters, would be 
worthy of mention in such a connection. The sec- 
ond reason is that no ordinary or local wind would 
have had any appreciable effect in drying up the re- 
mains of the Deluge that would be left after the sub- 
sidence of the ocean floor and the elevation of the 
present land surface. These two reasons make it a 
moral certainty that, if we are to take the record ac- 
cording to its obvious meaning, we must believe that 
the greatest elemental disturbance which this world 
ever saw took place at the close of the long period of 
submergence, and as the waters of the flood were re- 
treating to their present boundaries. 

And right here I might say a word concerning the 
well-known folding and doubling of the rocks seen 
in every great mountain range. We have already 
quoted standard authorities in chapter four, proving 
the absurdity of the current idea that our earth has a 
heated, molten interior. It must be solid through- 

8 Genesis 8:1. 



Biblical Geology. 159 

out, and be sufficiently rigid to withstand the tide- 
generating influences of the sun and moon. But 
equally evident is it that the cause for this folding 
and doubling of the rocks must lie at no great depth 
beneath the surface. A rational view that will per- 
fectly harmonize these apparently conflicting facts of 
the physicists and geologists is found in the scrip- 
tural teaching that our world had an aqueous not 
an igneous origin, and that, when formed, vast res- 
ervoirs of water were hidden away beneath the sur- 
face, it being largely the disturbance of these that 
caused the flood. Again, as most of the great 
mountain ranges lie near the seacoast, with the 
highest mountains quite near to some of the great- 
est depths of the oceans, we must trace some connec- 
tion between these two facts. Doubtless the original 
causes, whatever they were, of the land, air, and water 
being thrown so out of gear at the beginning of the 
Deluge, would, when removed, allow the elements to 
come back somewhat to their normal positions at its 
close. But to accommodate the greatly-increased 
amount of water on the surface, vast basins would 
have to be prepared, and this would necessitate a 
pushing up of the land on one side to make the neces- 
sary room, this pushing resulting in the enormous 
lateral pressure that folded and contorted the rocks 
in such an astonishing manner. 9 

And two more lines of thought still are implied in 
considering the action of the elements at the begin- 
ning of the flood. When those waterspouts burst 



9 See Psalms 104:8, margin. See note on page 94, also note 
on page 176. 



160 Modern Christianity and Modern Science. 

over all the earth, the deposits carried down into the 
valleys would now, if not disturbed by the subsequent 
turmoil and again rearranged, present the appear- 
ance of coarse conglomerates, sometimes composed of 
angular stones or chips, perhaps even of boulders; 
and would rest upon rocks perhaps entirely devoid 
of fossils. Such beds we do find underlying- the 
Silurian, Devonian, Carboniferous, in fact, about all 
the formations; and quite generally also the rocks 
beneath them again are devoid of fossils, and hence 
probably primitive, even though stratified. Of course, 
there would be other related phenomena. When con- 
glomerates are forming, we may be sure that sand and 
even finer silt must be settling somewhere, perhaps not 
very far away. And hence, perhaps over some ancient 
soil, we should expect to find such deposits. 

The other line of facts is easily deduced from the 
nature of the animal creation. The smaller and 
more helpless animals would be first submerged; 
doubtless the great commotions in the sea would 
make countless millions of fish, shell-fish, and other, 
the first victims. Their specific gravity alone would 
explain why we generally find Crustacea in the lower 
strata. The vertebrate fishes, if killed in numbers, 
would tend to rise to the surface. The larger animals 
and man would flee to the hill-tops from the rising 
waters, and, when finally engulfed, would be simply 
drowned, and not immediately covered with earthy 
deposits. After a few days or weeks decomposition 
would set in, and the countless carcasses, millions on 
millions in number, would rise and float on the sur- 
face of that shoreless ocean, to be, however, covered 



Biblical Geology. 161 

up in the superficial deposits, perhaps at the bases 
of the great mountain chains, when that terrible 
"wind" prevailed as the waters were subsiding. This 
may indeed have been one of the chief purposes ef- 
fected by this cosmic storm, viz., to cover up these 
decaying bodies everywhere floating about, and keep 
them from polluting the whole air with their foul 
stench. 

Such, then, are the teachings of the Mosaic nar- 
rative. Let us note how science brings to our view 
the results of this work. 

It is well known that the bones of the great extinct 
mammals, as well as those of the immense reptiles 
of the "secondary" rocks, are almost always found 
in comparatively superficial deposits, quite generally 
also among the foot-hills of ranges of mountains like 
the Rockies or the Himalayas. More than this, 
they are found together in such heaps, such vast 
numbers, as utterly to preclude the idea that they 
died and were buried in any ordinary way — unless, in- 
deed, those ancient animals had graveyards and 
buried their dead together. Thus, in speaking of the 
remains of the Zeuglodon (a kind of whale), Profes- 
sor Nicholson says: — 

"Remains of these gigantic whales are very com- 
mon in the ' Jackson beds' of the southern United 
States. So common are they that, according to 
Dana, 'the large vertebrae, some of them a foot and 
a half long and a foot in diameter, were formerly so 
abundant over the country in Alabama that they 
were used for making walls, or were burned to rid 
the fields of them.' " 10 



10 "Ancient Life History of the Earth," p. 300. 



1 62 Modern Christianity and Modern Science. 

Concerning some of the deposits of the western 
United States we are told that "remains of the Oreo- 
dontidae [extinct pig-like animals] occur in such vast 
numbers as to indicate that these animals must have 
lived in large herds around the borders of the lake- 
basins in which their remains have been entombed." 11 

Whether Professor Marsh's attempt at explanation 
really explains, I shall leave the reader to judge. It 
was the best he could do as a uniformitarian. But 
such collections of ancient remains are just what the 
sincere believer of Moses' record would expect to 
find. 

I might refer to the remains of the hipparion, also 
found in immense quantities in Europe and India, 
but shall confine myself to a more familiar example, 
those of the mammoth and other semitropical species 
found in such profusion in the Arctic regions. These 
in many cases have been so suddenly overwhelmed 
and embalmed in the ice that their undigested food, 
consisting of the boughs, bulbs, and leaves of semi- 
tropical plants, which, as we have seen, grew in that 
locality abundantly at that time, has been found in 
the stomachs of these beasts, as if the latter had been 
killed yesterday, proving that they were "quietly feed- 
ing when the crisis came." Most persons have read 
of the first specimen of the mammoth, found by a 
fisherman in 1799, on the bank of the Lena River 
near its mouth. When it finally tumbled out of the 
ice, after five years occupied in the latter melting 



11 Prof. O. C. Marsh, "Introduction and Succession of Verte- 
brate Life in America," p. 39. 



Biblical Geology. 163 

around it, the naturalist who wished to secure the 
specimen and pelt for the museum at St. Petersburg 
had great difficulty in saving it from the dogs and 
wolves, for its flesh was in a state of perfect preser- 
vation after its millenniums of entombment. But we 
are speaking now only of the abundance of these re- 
mains. 

"So abundant, indeed, are the remains of the mam- 
moth that for many years they have actually been 
quarried for the sake of the ivory — in 1821 no less a 
quantity than 20,000 pounds of this product having 
been obtained from New Siberia alone." 12 

Flower and Lydekker say that "in the middle of 
the tenth century an active trade was carried on at 
Khiva" in the well-preserved tusks of these creatures, 
and add: — 

"They are found at all suitable places along the 
whale line of the shore between the mouth of the Obi 
and Bering Straits, and the farther north the more 
numerous do they become, the islands of New Siberia 
being now one of the most favorite collecting localities. 
The soil of Bear Island and of Liachoff Islands is said 
to consist only of sand and ice, with such quantities 
of mammoth bones as almost to compose its chief 
substance." 13 

We might multiply such testimony to almost any 
extent, showing that almost all the so-called Sec- 
ondary and Tertiary rocks reveal a similar state of 
things, — remains of land and marine life all heaped 



12 James Geikie, "Great Ice Age," p. 459. 
18 "Introduction to the Study of Mammals, Living and Extinct," 
p. 430. 



164 Modern Christianity and Modern Science. 

together in certain sections in such vast numbers as 
to prove conclusively to any unbiased mind that they 
were destroyed all together and in some very extraor- 
dinary way. The elemental tumult described in 
Genesis 7 and 8 seems by far the most reasonable 
explanation of the facts as we know them. And there 
is, of course, no stratigraphical evidence — the only 
evidence of real value — to show that all these de- 
posits referred to above might not have been laid 
down at approximately one and the same time. 

The way in which species suddenly appear, and 
as suddenly and mysteriously disappear, when the 
fossils are heard in evidence one at a time, according 
to the popular theory, ought alone to be conclusive 
proof that scientists have somehow got things badly 
mixed. 

We have already given several quotations (chap- 
ter 5) on this point from Dawson, Nicholson, Clodd, 
and Huxley, showing the abrupt differences between 
their successive "ages," and need not reproduce them 
here, but instead will present the following from an 
authority equally good : — 

"The abruptness with which animal remains in 
considerable variety first appear in very ancient de- 
posits is undoubtedly a most remarkable phenomenon. 
With the exception of the still somewhat doubtful 
Eozoon, the vast series of Laurentian rocks have 
produced no fossils. But the moment we enter the 
Cambrian formation, we at once meet with a some- 
what extensive series of complex and varied organ- 
isms." 

He then speaks of the various forms of shell-fish, 



Biblical Geology. 165 

crustacese, corals, and sponges, of which, I believe, 
they have now discovered 165 species and 67 genera 
in this one formation; and he argues that this appar- 
ent suddenness of their appearance must be owing to 
the ''imperfection of the record," — there must have 
been lots of such forms existing for ages before, but 
their fossils have somehow disappeared. 

"This conclusion is supported by analogous facts, 
which occur and recur in every succeeding formation. 
The highly-specialized corals and fishes of the Silurian 
rocks must have had ancestors in Cambrian times of 
which we know nothing." 

The "sudden appearance of perfectly-developed 
winged insects in the Devonian formation" he ex- 
plains away in the same manner, saying that it "opens 
up to the imagination of the evolutionist a most 
wonderful picture" of previous ages of development, 
enabling him to "clothe these ancient lands with veg- 
etation and people them with animal life, since it is 
only thus that we can find space and time sufficient 
for the development of the wonderful insects, the 
land-shells, the Amphibia, and the reptiles, all of 
which appear suddenly, in perfect and completely- 
organised forms in some parts of the Palaeozoic 
series/' while in the Carboniferous rocks "such 
diversified and highly-specialized types of Annulosa 
as myriapods, spiders, cockroaches, locusts, dragon- 
flies, ephemeras, lamellicorn-beetles, and bombyciform 
moths" have been found; "that it is highly probable 
that no fresh ordinal type of insects has originated 
during all succeeding ages. ,}U 

"Alfred Russell Wallace, essay on "The Distribution of Life," 
PP- 35i 3 6 - Italics supplied. 



1 66 Modem Christianity and Modem Science. 

And so I might go on through nearly all the for- 
mations, but can only give one more example on this 
point from the larger land animals, for they likewise 
appear about as suddenly in all their glory, almost at 
the very beginning of the Tertiary age : — 

"At present, indeed, we have no decisive evidence 
of the existence of any members of the Eutherian sub- 
class previously to the Tertiary;" 15 and the Eutherian 
sub-class, as is well known, includes all the mammals 
except the monotremes and marsupials. But almost 
immediately, or before the close of the "Eocene pe- 
riod," which is the first division of the Tertiary 
epoch, "nearly all the chief groups of mammals had 
been clearly differentiated from one another." 16 

But it is tiresome to be always talking about the 
imperfection of the record, for, as Dawson says : — 

"When we find abundance of examples of the young 
and old of many fossil species, and can trace them 
through their ordinary embryonic development, why 
should we not find examples of the links which bound 
the species together?" 17 

The various more or less complete breaks between 
successive "periods" are equally well marked and 
even more notorious. Just as the various groups 
appear suddenly and mysteriously, so do they as 
abruptly drop out of sight, and we see them no more. 
But these breaks are so numerous and so well known 
that it would be tiresome to go into the enumeration 



15 Flower and Lydekker, "Mammals Living and Extinct," p. 
115. 
16 Id., p. 116. 
""Modern Ideas of Evolution," p. 35, 1891, revised edition. 



Biblical Geology. 167 

of them. The last and perhaps best known of all 
occurred at the close of the Pleistocene period, or 
what they call the "Glacial age," for they are now 
quite generally agreed that these two periods were 
contemporaneous and ended together. At that time 
there dropped out of sight those huge mammals on 
all the continents, — the mammoth and woolly 
rhinoceros in Europe, the mammoth and mastodon 
in North America, the great sloths and armadillos 
in South America, and the huge kangaroos and 
wombats in Australia; and along with them there 
disappeared those human giants found in the caves 
of western Europe. With regard to this one break 
at least, it seems quite evident that, as Dana would 
say, it was caused by the "flood, vast beyond con- 
ception," which was "the final event in the history 
of the glacier," or their great ice sheet. But while 
this last great break is more familiar to the world, 
because it deals with these huge animal forms that 
everybody is familiar with, there are nearly two dozen 
other breaks, more or less as extensive, which are just 
as familiar to geologists, though less widely known, 
because they deal with obscure forms that do not so 
appeal to the memory and imagination. But these 
sudden appearances and disappearances are inevitable, 
and just what we would expect, if, as I have said, 
these formations do not represent ages, but are 
simply taxonomic classifications in the life-forms of 
a complete world that has disappeared from view. At 
any rate, it would seem to be decided economy of 
energy to arrange for these various submergences of 
whole continents and wholesale extinctions of species 



1 68 Modern Christianity and Modem Science. 

to occur at one time and from the same cause. For, 
unless we assume the succession of life, there is ab- 
solutely nothing to show that all these countless fos- 
sil forms were not cut off at approximately one time 
and by the same catastrophe. 

Then, again, as to the character of these remains. 
Leaving out the lower forms of life, and dealing now 
only with the vertebrates, it is, I believe, true that al- 
most all existing species have had their representative 
ancestors untombed from the rocky vaults. In spite 
of the current ideas of modern progress, the majority 
of these ancestors of present-day species present us 
with forms: (i) Larger of their kind; (2) having 
the characteristic organs of use or ornament, e. g., 
the antlers of the deer, the horns of the rhinoceros, 
or the tusks of the elephant, far more strongly devel- 
oped even proportionately; (3) in many cases also of 
a larger cerebral development than their modern 
specific representatives. And while these three points 
do not absolutely prove that these fossil forms were 
more healthy, and in the natural course of events 
lived longer than the moderns, yet, taken together, 
they point that way strongly, almost conclusively. 
Hence we may add greater vitality and longevity as 
points wherein they probably far surpassed the species 
now living. 

In the language of the schools, each reached its 
"culmination" in some of the "ages" of the past, and 
their modern representatives, so changed as to be 
scarcely identical, are acknowledged to be sadly de- 
generate. Where modern geologists err is in mak- 
ing these different "culminations" in successive 



Biblical Geology. 1 69 

"ages" one after another; but, as we have seen, this 
is pure assumption. To the believer in Genesis they 
are all contemporary with one another, the so-called 
succession of life being, as we have so frequently 
shown, only the classification or taxonomic series, as 
the biologists call it, in the life of the antediluvian 
world. The fossils, if allowed to tell their story 
in concert instead of in single file, proclaim in thunder 
tones that degeneration has marked the history of 
every living form, even since the flood, though even 
these fossils are doubtless far beneath the forms or- 
iginally created. 

As for the proofs of these three assertions given 
above, I do not consider such at all necessary. The 
first is certainly too notorious. 18 The second is al- 
most equally well known. As for the third point, 
about cerebral development, I am well aware that 
Prof. E. Ray Lankester and others have written vari- 
ous works showing the increased size of brain in 
"recent" or modern mammalia, as compared with 
"their early Tertiary or Mesozoic forebears." But 

18 "Thus the brute races of the Middle Quaternary on all the 
continents exceeded the moderns greatly in magnitude. Why, 
no one has explained." — Dana's Geological Story Briefly Told, 
p. 229. Ivison, Blakeman, Taylor & Co., 1875. 

" Nothing is more evident in the history of the fossil animals 
and plants of past geological ages than that persistence or de- 
generacy are the rule rather than the exception. . . . We 
may almost say that all things left to themselves tend to degener- 
ate, and only a new breathing of the Almighty Spirit can start 
them again on the path of advancement. This idea might, per- 
haps, form the basis of a new philosophy of creation more profit- 
able than that of evolution." — Modern Ideas of Evolution, 
appendix, by Sir J. W. Dawson, 1891 (Italics supplied). 



170 Modern Christianity and Modern Science. 

what manner of bearing has this fact — for fact 
it undoubtedly is — upon my statement above? I 
have not said that the reptiles or marsupials of the 
Trias, for instance, had as large brains proportion- 
ately as modern placentals or even the extinct ones 
of the Post-Pliocene. The higher types in the tax- 
onomic series, ancient or modern, certainly have 
larger brains than the lower types. It is one of the 
principal reasons why they are classed as "higher" 
in the scale. And, as I contend, the huge placental 
mammals of the Eocene, for instance, can only be 
"proved" more recent than the marsupials of the 
Trias by showing that they are higher in the scale 
of life. Let objectors only stop a moment, and they 
will see that all I claim is that the ancient types gen- 
erally show, on every point on which their remains 
enable us to form an opinion, a far more perfect de- 
velopment than their modern specific representatives; 
and this general statement I feel sure there is no com- 
petent authority so rash as to deny. We, the con- 
ceited dwarfs of the present, are slow to believe what 
glorious plant and animal forms existed before the 
flood. 

The same strong evidence to the historic truth of 
Genesis is given us when we consider the question 
of climate. Every "age," from "Silurian times" down 
to the "recent," bears witness, through its coral lime- 
stones, or remains of plant and land animal life, that 
the climate in which these forms lived was of the most 
mild and genial description, and singularly uniform, 
"periods during which the whole northern hemi- 
sphere enjoyed a kind of perpetual summer."™ The 



19 James Geikie, "Great Ice Age," p. 97. 



Biblical Geology. 171 

same species have been found distributed over all this 
continent from Florida to Labrador, and even far 
within the Arctic Circle, a singular uniformity of 
climate that we can scarcely comprehend. These 
facts agree well with what we know of antediluvian 
times. The cloudless, rainless skies of those glori- 
ous days when the earth was young betoken a vastly 
different condition of the atmosphere from what we 
have to-day. But what is our astonishment when 
we are told, almost in the same breath, that every 
formation, from the "Silurian" to the "recent," pre- 
sents unmistakable evidence of "ice action" over the 
same areas and practically at the same timet Talk 
about credulity! What, then, becomes of our "one 
great act of faith, — faith in the uniformity of na- 
ture," — about which we used to hear so much from 
Professor Huxley? Why, this invoking the power 
of ice action in a semitropical climate is contrary to 
their own favorite "law of parsimony," which, we 
are told, "forbids us to invoke the operation of higher 
causes to account for effects which lower causes suffice 
to explain." How can they have the assurance to bid 
us leave the plain, consistent, and eminently reason- 
able explanation of Moses, and accept this "rotation 
of climates," as James Geikie calls it, without the most 
undoubted evidence that the phenomena spoken of 
was really caused by ice action? 

No wonder the latter author exclaims:— 

"Geologists are staggered by the appearance of 

glacial deposits in the Permian, a formation whose 

fossils indicate mild and genial rather than cold, cli- 

matal conditions. The occurrence in the Eocene, 



t?2 Modern Christianity and Modern Science. 

also, of huge, ice-carried blocks seems incomprehen- 
sible when the general character of the Eocene fossils 
is taken into account, for these have a somewhat 
tropical aspect. So likewise the appearance of ice- 
transported blocks in the Miocene is a sore puzzle." "* 

That is, palms and other tropical plants grew 
abundantly in England, and the cinnamon and fig, 
with palms, etc., grew in North America, in both 
Eocene and Miocene "times ;" while in the latter, many 
evergreens, together with luxuriant ivies and vines, 
large-leaved oaks, and walnuts, and even Sequoias 
(like the pines and "big trees" of California) and 
magnolias, grew in Northern Greenland, "within 
twelve degrees of the pole." n I should think that 
glaciers over Europe in such a climate were rather a 
"sore puzzle" for the most ingenious "uniformitarian." 

To make the matter worse, they are finding these 
evidences of "glacial action" over such enormous 
areas that many of our leading investigators are be- 
coming dazed at the problems involved in making 
their theories appear even moderately reasonable. 
For a long time they have taught us that a great 
winding-sheet of ice extended over the northern re- 
gions down to about 40 ° north in America, and to 
about 50 in the Old World, though curiously enough 
confined between the Missouri River and the Dakotas 
on the west and the Ural Mountains on the east. 
Agassiz, indeed, and others of the older geologists, 
taught that the glacial winter was cosmic, i. e., en- 
crusted the whole globe with ice ; and, as we have seen 
in the previous chapter, the strong evidence of this 

20 "Great Ice Age," p. 480. 

'^Nicholson, "Ancient Life-History," p. 310. 



Biblical Geology. J 73 

comparative universality at least was made the basis 
of the "interval" or "restitution theory" of creation, 
which was started by Buckland and advocated by many 
others. But this idea of a universal coat of ice has 
been gradually hushed down by the ridicule of mod- 
ern geologists, most of whom, as evolutionists, of 
course can not believe in the great break in the suc- 
cession of life which this would involve. Besides, it 
would labor under the grave inconvenience of har- 
monizing too closely with the Biblical story of a uni- 
versal deluge, if for ice we only substitute water. 
But more recently they have been finding abundant 
traces of the same phenomena in different parts of 
Australia, India, South Africa, and South America — 
tropical or semitropical countries — though in some 
cases they are obliged to locate them in "Permo- 
Carboniferous times," that is, contemporary with the 
luxuriant vegetation of the coal beds, and though in 
each case they say the deposits are stratified, and there- 
fore could not have been produced by glaciers. 22 



22 See the outline of a remarkable paper by Professor Penck, 
in Nature ; Feb. 21, 1901, p. 405. I know that many, per- 
haps I might say most, of the leading geologists think that 
the astronomical theory of successive glacial ages through all 
"geological time," advanced by Croll and advocated by James 
Geikie in his "Great Ice Age" above referred to, is not justified 
by the facts of their science. See "Controverted Questions of 
Geology," Article II, by Joseph Prestwich, Macmillan & Co., 1895. 
But the various theories that are substituted — there are nearly a 
dozen of them — in the endeavor to account for a glacial age at 
all between the warm Tertiary and equally mild Post-Pliocene, are 
none of them satisfactory, while the evidences of somewhat similar 
phenomena in all the other formations, as quoted above from James 
Geikie, can not be denied. The plain, simple facts are certainly 
more explicable on the hypothesis of a universal Deluge than on 
any other yet advanced. 



/ 



174 Modem Christianity and Modern Scieme. 

But these things are no longer puzzles, fior 
are such minor occurrences as marine forms mixed 
up with the coal and land plants with the deep-sea 
limestones, already referred to, if we only forget this 
ever-haunting specter of the succession of life, and 
remember that all these deposits were laid down at 
that universal churning up of the soil of the ancient 
world, the Noachian Deluge. 

With the positive proofs of semi-tropical condi- 
tions far within the Arctic Circle, I can not believe 
that there was at the time of the flood sufficient ice 
even about the poles to come down over the sub- 
merged earth as icebergs, though Dawson has told 
us that the facts in eastern North America could be 
sufficiently explained in this way. But as the great 
tempest of the subsiding Deluge occurred after our 
climate had radically and suddenly changed, as wit- 
nessed by the entombment of the mammoth, etc., in 
the ice, and also at the close of our northern winter, 
we may well imagine floating ice to have had some 
share in the distribution of the "drift." But it is not 
at all necessary to take every apparently unstratified 
deposit containing angular stones as having been pro- 
duced by moving ice, to say nothing of glaciers. 
When water really gets in a hurry, it can pile thing s. 
up in quite a wonderful manner, its transporting 
force varying directly as the sixth power of its ve- 
locity. That is, "a stream flowing twenty miles an 
hour will carry one million times as much as a stream 
flowing two miles an hour," and would be capable of 
moving blocks of stone "of 320 tons and upwards." 
And hence, even in some modern instances, it would 



Biblical Geology. x 75 

bother some of our uniformitarians to find any strati- 
graphical arrangements in the work it does. As has 
been remarked, it is not difficult to imagine some sud- 
den shifting of the earth's axis, so chilling our atmos- 
phere as to precipitate its moisture to the earth in 
universal cataracts. Some mass of hydrogen, like that 
of Donati's comet of 1858, floating through space, may 
have been attracted into our atmosphere, and, after 
robbing us of a vast amount of our oxygen, have de- 
scended upon our world in mighty waterfalls. If we 
suppose the first of these views, the interior reservoirs 
of water, "the fountains of the great deep," would 
also at the same time, and because of this change 
of equilibrium, exert such a pressure upon the crust 
as to break forth in mighty rivers over the trembling 
earth. Perhaps the second of these causes may be 
considered as contributing to bring about the first, 
though I know they tell us that a comet is "lighter 
than vanity, " and hence would not be supposed ca- 
pable of disturbing the equilibrium of our earth. But 
I must leave these considerations for our astrono- 
mers to speculate about. 28 



23 Since this chapter was in type, I have had the (to me) great 
pleasure of reading "The Glacial Nightmare and the Flood," in 
two volumes, by Sir Henry Howorth, F. R. S., F. G. S., etc., 
whose other work on the Mammoth I have quoted below second- 
hand from Professor Zahm. Of this one I have only space here to 
say that I consider it a masterly and unanswerable argument that 
mere ice in any form and postulated in any quantity will not 
explain the drift phenomena, while a violent movement of the 
waters will do so perfectly. His books certainly indicate the 
turn of the tide in modern scientific opinion. It is a pity that 
this one before me is so full of typographical errors. But in spite 



176 Modern Christianity and Modern Science. 

Then, again, when the waters finally subsided, and 
the world was as it is to-day, with its present ex- 
treme climate in the north and south temperate 
zones, as every green thing had been destroyed, and 
most fruitful seeds buried too deep to germinate, even 

of this I believe that many good authorities regard it as a sort of ■ 
epitaph of the current glacial theories, though, of course, it will be 
some time before these theories will cease to be taught as 
"science" to our little children in the public schools. 

A good many authors, Sir William Dawson among the number, 
have thought an extraordinary tidal movement of the waters to be 
indicated by the Hebrew expression "going and returning" (Gen. 
8:3, 5, margin), which is used about the waters when retreating to 
their present boundaries. I had not attached much importance 
to the idea, but a striking passage in Howorth's work has recalled 
it, and I give it here for what it is worth, though Ho worth himself 
does not by any means approve of a shifting of the earth's axis as 
a possible cause for his diluvial wave, or "wave of translation," 
but rather postulates this flood of water being caused by some 
sudden movements of the ocean bed. He expressly declares a 
disturbance of the earth's axis to be almost unthinkable, but 
adds: — 

"If this were done on a great scale and rapidly, it would no 
doubt cause a change in the latter axis [its old axis of revolution] , 
and, as Professor Houghton says, the earth would begin to wab- 
ble, and it would continue to wabble, as a top does when going to 
sleep, until the two axes had again coincided. Meanwhile, how- 
ever, the crust of the earth would be tremendously shattered and 
dislocated, and, as Mr. Twisden has shown, two vast tide waves 
would sweep the earth, submerging the equator every 130 days 
to a depth of six miles or more" (vol. 1, p. 343). With this let 
the reader compare the 750 days mentioned in Gen. 7:24 and 8:3, 
and draw his own conclusions, though I submit that a tidal dis- 
turbance one-tenth part as great would be sufficient to explain all 
the phenomena of the flood, and almost sufficient to account for 
the mountain-making and folding and doubling of the soft super- 
ficial strata at its close. See note, page 94. 



Biblical Geology. 17 7 

if they could stand a year's submergence, there would 
for many years be little vegetation to keep the great 
coats of ice from sliding down the sides of all our 
northern mountains in the spring, when the frost 
began to relax. The first few succeeding centuries 
may, on account of the desolate condition of the earth, 
have been tenfold more extreme in climate than the 
present, which would be sufficient to account for all 
the positive proofs of former greater glacier extension 
in the Alps and other mountains. Taken together, 
these things would seem to afford a much more reason- 
able explanation of the observed facts than any of the 
theories of the geologists. 

There are other points in connection with these so- 
called "glacial" phenomena that offer very inviting- 
fields for study in this connection, illustrating how 
easily the Biblical story will immediately solve the 
other stock puzzles of the geologists. Some of these 
would be problems in connection with the numerous 
"interglacial periods," such as the well-known Diirn- 
ten beds, in Switzerland, consisting of lignite ten feet 
thick, with "glacial" deposits both above and below; 
and the many cases where remains of reindeer, 
musk-ox, and other animals at present inhabiting 
Arctic regions, are found mixed up with those of 
other animals now found only in the tropics, such as 
various kinds of elephants, rhinoceroses, and even a 
hippopotamus, the latter of which at least could not 
possibly live where the streams froze over even in 
winter. But if the climate of antediluvian times 
was uniform all over the globe, as the fossils and the 
Bible alike testify, then these animals must certainly 



178 Modern Christianity and Modern Science. 

have lived together in about the same latitude, their 
very diverse habitats now having been a wise adapta- 
tion of instinct to suit the changed climatic condi- 
tions of the present. We may even suppose our 
present Arctic types being originally adapted to the 
high mountains and tablelands. Either of these con- 
siderations seems far more reasonable than the idea 
of the numerous glacial epochs, with the animals 
careering after one another alternately up and down 
the earth, like droves of crazy Scandinavian lemmings, 
across bays and seas, as their migration theory in- 
volves. No wonder Sir Henry Howorth pronounces 
the theory of the great Ice Age, as understood by 
glacialists generally, to be "the wildest dream which 
a fertile imagination ever imported into science." In 
the most emphatic terms he declares that he does not 
"believe in interglacial periods, in a great, overwhelm- 
ing ice-cap, in the physical possibility of land ice mov- 
ing for hundreds of miles over level plains like that 
of Poland, or in the possibility of tropical America 
being so glaciated that the valley of the Amazon was 
filled with ice." 24 But I shall not follow these ideas 



24 Quoted from ''The Mammoth and the Flood," by Sir 
Henry Howorth, in "Bible, Science, and Faith," p. 253, by 
Prof. J. A. Zahm, 1894. Professor Zahm gives some references, 
which I also repeat here for those of my readers who may wish to 
go into this subject more fully, — the Scottish and Edinburgh 
Reviews for October, 1893; the London Quarterly Review for 
January, 1894; the Nineteenth Century for February, 1894; also 
recent numbers of the Geological Magazine. From what little I 
know of the current controversies about the glacial period it seems 
very evident that the modern uniformitarian geology has, of late 
years, been growing so top-heavy with absurdity that a crash is 
inevitable before long. 



Biblical Geology. 179 

further, inviting though they be. I think I have given 
enough to show that the geologists have quite long 
enough followed Spencer's plan of "reconciling facts" 
to suit their theories, and might profitably try the re- 
verse for a little while. 

I think I have already referred to Dawson's "Meet- 
ing-place of Geology and History" (1894). In this 
he has occasion to speak of human remains found 
in anteglacial deposits. Some of these he disposes 
of quite readily; not so, however, with others. And 
in considering the unimpeachable testimony of M. 
Quatrefages concerning a nearly perfect skeleton 
found near Brescia in undisturbed Pliocene beds, as 
well as almost equally reliable evidence of man's ex- 
istence at least in "Miocene times," Sir William's 
treatment of the matter seems to me far from satis- 
factory. Incredible as it may seem in such a respect- 
able authority, he is even driven to talking about the 
flint implements being "the handiwork of Miocene 
apes" ! But these ancient remains, even from their 
standpoint, do not in any way tend to confirm the 
evolution theory, for the skeleton for which the great 
French anthropologist stands sponsor has a well- 
developed skull, "superior to those of the ruder types 
of post-glacial men." 25 As Wright remarks, "Eter- 
nity itself is scarcely long enough for the develop- 
ment of species if the rate of change is no greater than 
is implied if man and his companions, both of the 
animal and vegetable kingdoms, were substantially 
what they now are as long ago as the date often as- 



25 "The Meeting-place of Geology and History," pp. 28, 29. 



180 Modem Christianity and Modem Science. 

signed to the great Ice Age." 26 More especially is 
this true, then, if man dates from "Pliocene," per- 
haps even "Miocene times." According to Dr. Croll's 
theory — the one most generally received — the so- 
called Glacial Period began about 250,000 years and 
ended about 80,000 years ago. The Pliocene was the 
preceding one, say from 500,000 years down to the 
beginning of the Glacial Period. The Miocene pre- 
ceded this, and if man existed then, it might carry us 
back a million years more or less. Indeed, says 
Prestwich, "One friend of ours, in a public lecture, 
even put in a claim for two millions" 2 ' 1 When it was 
only a matter of some 10,000 or 20,000 years of a 
total blank between this first appearance of man and 
the beginnings of civilization and history, a blank 
during which man made no progress, most scientists 
with little faith in the Bible were disposed to attack 
the problem with some courage. But when the tens 
of thousands mount to hundreds of thousands, or 
even to millions, no wonder that the most courageous 
of them shake their heads in despair, and say there 
must be something wrong. For there is not a shadow 
of doubt that in scores of cases human remains have 
been found in deposits which would otherwise be 
placed far back in "Tertiary times." But surely here 
is one of the strongest possible evidences that the 
geologists have somehow got things mixed, and that 
their "formations" do not and can not represent 
"ages," but are simply taxonomic classifications in the 
life of the antediluvian world. 



r ° "Great Ice Age of North America," chapter 20. 
zl "Controverted Questions," p 8. 



Biblical Geology. 1S1 

Returning to our main subject: It seems evident 
that the chief difference between the world as we 
know it and the world before the flood is due to some 
great change in the atmospheric conditions. Those 
rainless skies, with a semitropical climate universal 
over the globe, are proof of this; as is also the long 
life of man and the great vigor and luxuriance of the 
animal and vegetable forms found fossil in the rocks. 
They all speak to us of an atmosphere more vitaliz- 
ing than we have now. It would even seem probable 
that ordinary decay and fermentation were then com- 
paratively unknown, for in the first recorded instance 
of the kind, 28 it seems to have been altogether a new 
and unexpected result. Whether there was more 
carbonic-acid gas in the air then, and whether any 
material increase of this would be consistent with the 
great vigor of the animals, I know not. It would 
seem to account for the luxuriance of the plant life. 
Simply a denser atmosphere might allow far more 
water vapor to be suspended in it without precipita- 
tion, and might, as Tyndall thought, account for 
that singularly uniform climate over all the world. 
I have already suggested that some mass of burning 
hydrogen floating in space might have been attracted 
into our atmosphere, and might in that case have 
robbed us of a large share of our oxygen, leaving 
our breath-supply in the impoverished condition in 
which it is at present. What has really produced 
the change, we may never know in this life; but cer- 
tain it is that there has been a great alteration in 
our atmosphere since those glorious, balmy, spring- 
like days, when the earth was young. 



28 Genesis 9:20, 21. 



1 82 Modern Christianity and Modern Science. 

But one more point deserves notice ere closing. 
The coal plants of the Carboniferous beds, they say, 
are nearly all ferns, club-mosses, pines, etc. Now we 
can not for a moment think that the antediluvian for- 
ests were composed entirely of such plants. We might 
believe that the different classes of plants were seg- 
regated more into districts by themselves than now, 
just as we sometimes find quite extensive forests com- 
posed of but one kind of tree, say maples or spruces; 
though it would seem that the washing of the water 
would be likely to mix them all up together. Doubt- 
less the varying specific gravities of the plants in 
question may have had something to do with clas- 
sifying them off together as we find them. Or the 
plants may have been buried quite near where they 
grew, by the action of the rising water, assisted partly 
by the tides, as certainly seems to be indicated in the 
coal beds at the head of the Bay of Fundy. Bat 
what of the other trees that must have existed at this 
same time? — Just this: There are abundant proofs 
of them in the lignites or brown coals, composed of 
such plants as conifers, beeches, oaks, maples, plane 
trees, walnuts, magnolias, vines, figs, palms, etc., etc., 
which are found in almost every part of the world; 
and we have also abundant proofs in the character 
of their remains that they were suddenly over- 
whelmed, for the delicate forms of the leaves, and 
even the petals of the flowers, have in many cases 
been accurately preserved. But the geologists, ac- 
cording to the nature of their "science," have put 
these lignites in the other formations, because, for- 
sooth, their plants are higher in the scale of life. 



Biblical Geology. 183 

"Workable coal seams, however, occur in the va- 
rious other formations (Jurassic, Cretaceous, and 
Tertiary), so that coal is not an exclusively Carbon- 
iferous product." 29 

Lignite beds of these formations have been found 
in almost all parts of the world, — in England, on the 
continent, in various places in western America, in 
Australia, over a large part of eastern Asia, as well 
as in Greenland and Spitzbergen within 12 of the 
north pole, as already mentioned elsewhere. Nor are 
they thin or insignificant in extent. On the contrary, 
these brown coals are among the most abundant of all. 
Of many examples, I can give but one, from Victoria, 
Australia, as described by Mr. Sterling, the govern- 
ment geologist of that colony, before the Imperial 
Institute in London : — 

"A bore put down by the government at Mary vale, 
near Morewelltown, has proved 780 feet of brown 
coal, in beds more than 260 feet in thickness. . . . 
Six hundred square miles of these Tertiary brown- 
coal beds are known to exist in Victoria, of which 
300 square miles, with 31,144,390,000 tons of the 
fuel, occur in the Latrobe Valley." 30 

Then, again, we must remember that very few if any 
of the plants have been identified that went to pro- 
duce our anthracite or hard coal, so abundant in 
Wales and Pennsylvania. Indeed, in ordinary bitu- 
minous or soft coal, while many of the plants have 
been identified as ferns, club-mosses, and Conifers 
(allied to the existing pines and firs), yet it would 

23 Nicholson's "Ancient Life-History of the Earth," p. 157. 
* Nature, Nov. 21, 1901, p. 59. 



184 Modem Christianity and Modem Science. 

be rash to say that no other plants are found in coal 
of this sort. We also know that there is every pos- 
sible shade of gradation between the most graphitic 
hard coal and the only slightly-altered lignite, which 
seems more like pressed wood than anything else. 
And while, of course, there are real differences 
throughout in the kinds of plants, which can well 
be understood as due to distinctly different kinds of 
forests being buried near where they grew, yet I think 
it might be quite successfully maintained that the 
principal difference in character may be far more 
generally due to differences in the amount of pressure 
and of the heat generated by the plants themselves, 
the lignite having "lost less of its original constituents 
than coal" because subjected to less pressure, 81 and 
doubtless, also, less spontaneously generated heat and 
chemical change. For it is a well-established fact 
that in any given bed of considerable thickness the 
heat- giving qualities increase with the depth, i. e., the 
lower is more changed than the upper. Again, almost 
all kinds of coal contain traces of the yellow sulfids 
known as pyrites, which, Dawson says, are "an indi- 
cation that sea-water had access to these beds while 
the vegetable matter was still recent f n and the 
astonishingly well-preserved character of the plants 
themselves in very many cases shows positively that 
they were buried while the plants were still green, 
leaves and flowers and fruits being all reproduced be- 
fore us as when they grew. It is impossible that such 
things could have lain for centuries rotting in a peat- 

31 See Prestwich, "Controverted Questions," p, 38. 

32 "Acadian Geology," p. 164. 



Biblical Geology. 185 

bog, as is commonly supposed. No, these lignites at 
least were formed from forests suddenly buried, and 
we naturally infer that all coal has been formed in 
this way. And by what manner of evidence, save on 
their ubiquitous succession of life, can it be proved 
that all these various kinds of coal are not contem- 
poraneous and buried at the same time ? 

As we have already remarked, "modern analysis 
tends to the conclusion that our world is solid 
throughout." 33 Good! They are only getting back 
to the words of David and Job. May we not hope 
that it will not be long before the more candid among 
our naturalists will go back even further, and believe 
the old-fashioned story of a complete world destroyed 
for its wickedness by a cosmic Deluge ? For it is 
certain that modern discoveries in geology are fast 
developing a gigantic reductio ad absurdum argument 
against the theories of Hutton and Lyell. 

During the past hundred years, while science has 
been pouring such silent, but none the less eloquent, 
contempt upon this story of a universal Deluge, how 
many Christians (?) have secretly wished that this 
troublesome record was not there! How many 
would almost .have liked to cut it out if they only 
could have done so on the sly! Even now, with the 
scientific witnesses crowding together from all sides, 
like a very theater crush, and the nineteenth-century 
fabric of evolutionary geology built up with such in- 
defatigable care already tottering to its fall, there will 
be thousands of well-meaning men who will still pre- 
sent their captious questions and insist on our answer- 

33 Nature, Feb. 28, 1901, p. 414. 






1 86 Modern Christianity and Modem Science. 

ing them here and now. They will ask where we 
would get water enough to cover the Alps or the 
Himalayas. We must remind them that, as Dana 
says, "there is nearly three times as much water sur- 
face as land surface, the relation of water to land area 
being 2% to 1. The average depth of the sea is 13,000 
feet, the average elevation of the land being 1,000 
feet. The ocean, then, is thirteen times as deep as the 
land is high, and has a surface area of 254 times as 
large as that of the land ;" that there is about 36 times 
as much water below sea-level as there is land above it. 
Consequently, as another author remarks, "if the 
entire present land surface of the earth should sink 
into the ocean, it would raise the level of the water 
only a little more than 200 feet, which is only three 
times as much as the tide sometimes rises in the Bay 
of Fundy." 3 * More than this, they must remember 
that the Alps, Himalaya, and all the great mountain 
ranges, are built up of geological strata laid down, 
perhaps, nearly horizontally by the waters of the 
Deluge, but folded and elevated to their present height 
by the great lateral pressure that accompanied its sub- 
sidence. 

They may further object that the ark, with its 
nearly 100,000 square feet, or over two acres, of 
flooring, and its 30,000 or 40,000 tons capacity, and 
though thus capable of carrying 5,600 men and pro- 
visions for eighteen months, would nevertheless be 
insufficient for its task of carrying sample pairs of all 
the land animals. Hugh Miller declared it impossi- 

54 Dr. F. G. Wright, "Geology and the Deluge," McCZure's 
Magazine. June, 1901 p. 138. 



Biblical Geology. 187 

ble, and so did Dr. Geikie. But A. R. Wallace and 
Prof. H. A. Ward tell us that the 1,700 species of 
mammalia average in size the gray fox or the com- 
mon house cat; and Dr. Howard Osgood, and others 
equally reliable, declare, with irrefutable figures, that 
the above dimensions of the ark are amply sufficient to 
carry twice the number of sample specimens required, 
as well as twice the amount of food ; in short, that the 
problem is entirely within the bounds of ordinary 
water transportation. 35 

However, it is not at all necessary to suppose that 
anything like the present number of so-called "species" 
were represented in the ark by separate pairs of an- 
cestors. Whatever Darwinism may have failed to do, 
it has at least shown us that they are not all species 
(in the broadest sense) which are called "species." 
For example, we know that such an extreme type of 
pig as the short-nosed Berkshire has actually been 
produced from the extremely different Wild Boar 
(Sus scrofa). Flower and Lydekker enumerate over 
twenty species of wild pigs scattered over the Old 
World, and think it probable that they will all "breed 
freely together." 36 We also know that such diverse 
types of dog as pug, greyhound, and Scotch terrier 
have been produced within historic times from some 
wild type, perhaps of the wolves or jackals, or from 
the crossing of several. Possibly the whole family 
Canidae may represent but one or two original types, 
and the almost countless species of deer and antelope 
but a very few distinct pairs of ancestors; though, of 



25 See D. T. Taylor's "Christianity and Science," pp. 12, 13. 
36 "Introduction to the Study of Mammals," pp. 284, 285. 



1 88 Modem Christianity and Modern Science. 

course, if I were looking for any such ancestral forms 
among the fossils, I would not look lower in the scale 
of life, as the evolutionists do, but higher; I would 
look for specimens larger and better developed in every- 
way than any similar modern species. It has long 
been considered that the various species of brown 
bear of Europe and Asia, as well as the grizzly bear 
of North America, are probably only well-marked 
varieties, and the latest investigators in the caves of 
Belgium seem to consider them all identical with the 
gigantic cave bear (U. spelaens) of the Pleistocene 
deposits, 37 with which, as Dana says, "these modern 
kinds are dwarfs in comparison." These modern fine 
specific distinctions are, of course, eminently proper, 
because very convenient. But it is evident that, if we 
take a broad view of species, and believe all modern 
types to be of common descent, which would probably, 
under favorable circumstances, prove cross-fertile with 
one another, the problem of accommodation in a vessel 
of 30,000 or 40,000 tons capacity presents no diffi- 
culties whatever. 

Another and much more formidable objection I can 
do little more than allude to. They may ask us how 
from the one center of Armenia, the thousands of land 
animals became geographically distributed as they are 
to-day; especially how the various species in many 
cases wandered back to the very same lands where they 
had been before, and where their fossil ancestors lay 
buried. The distribution of plant forms I may pass 
over as entirely insignificant, as their seeds or roots 
might remain in the soil ; the insects and birds present 

37 See Nature, Nov. 7, 1901, p. 13. 



Biblical Geology. 189 

few difficulties; and I might reply that the geograph- 
ical distribution of all animals from Armenia after 
the Deluge, presents very similar problems, and very 
few more of them, than the evolutionists have so long 
practised themselves in solving. I shall not attempt 
to explain these puzzles in detail, and can only attrib- 
ute the marvelous results visible to-day to that same 
inscrutable instinct, the tangible proof of the Divine 
Immanency, which, as the Bible declares, "bids the 
swallow observe the time of her coming." 

The little opossums of America, to say nothing of 
other reasons, forbid the evolutionists to make Aus- 
tralia the original home of the Marsupials, as they 
would dearly like to do. Similar cogent necessities 
make it much more convenient to have even the 
Edentates of South America (sloths, armadillos, and 
ant-eaters) originate in the Old World. In fact, they 
are compelled to postulate Eurasia as the birthplace 
of about all the important land animals ; and they are 
particularly careful when disposing of their great ice- 
sheet to provide a good, warm, dry strip of land from 
Asia to America via Alaska, so as to admit of the 
free passage to and fro of the "Pleistocene mammals." 
But if the evolutionists' fauna can thus distribute 
themselves over the world, guided by nothing but 
chance or their personified "adaptation," it will not 
require a high degree of faith to believe that, guided 
by a divinely-implanted instinct suited to the neces- 
sities of the situation, the whole of the land animals 
might, in a few hundred years at most, become again 
distributed over the world as we now have them, even 
though we may not be able to bid the continents rise 
and subside as they do to facilitate the process. 



190 Modern Christianity and Modern Science. 

If the distribution of these surviving animals de- 
pended upon such chance work only as the evolution 
theory can command, we might consider the chances 
appallingly great against the sloths, armadillos, etc., 
finding their way back to South America, where their 
relatives (surely not their ancestors!), the colossal 
Megatheriums and Glyptodons lay entombed; or 
against the Marsupials finding their way back to 
Australia, where, as A. R. Wallace says, "extinct 
wombats as large as tapirs, kangaroos the size of ele- 
phants, and a phalanger nearly as large as a lion," 
lay buried in the cave deposits. But we believe in 
there being such a thing as instinct — something above 
mere habit. We are not appealing to anything super- 
mundane when we assume an instinct that will lead 
animals over immense distances in search of suitable 
food or suitable climate. The food plants of South 
America and Australia would again be substantially 
the same as before the Deluge, in kind at least, as seeds 
or roots in the superficial deposits would erelong 
spring up near their former habitats; and thither the 
instinct of these animals would lead them — I will not 
say back again, for doubtless all the actual specimens 
saved in the ark were gathered from some compara- 
tively-limited area near at hand; but let us say to the 
former feeding-grounds of similar animals. And 
why not? If these distant countries were to be re- 
stocked with animals of any sort, these might as well 
go there as any others. And if a pair of bobolinks 
hatched in New Brunswick can find their way prac- 
tically alone, and with many stops and stays, down 
across the equator, clear into the heart of South 



Biblical Geology. 191 

America for their winter home, a journey not short of 
4,000 miles, or a sixth part of the whole distance 
around the globe, to return without fail next spring 
to their northern birthplace, we have no need to 
postulate anything "supernatural" to suppose that the 
extraordinary circumstances of their situation would 
lead all the creatures preserved in the ark to scatter 
over the earth in search of the most suitable food and 
climate. From the eleventh chapter of Genesis we 
learn that the Lord commanded mankind to "scatter 
abroad upon the face of all the earth," and it would 
be according to the usual thing if, while men were 
disobedient, the dumb brutes obeyed the instinct of 
their Maker. 

"The world was all before them, where to choose 
Their place of rest, and Providence their guide." 

But I must now give a few examples to show that 
the problems are not exclusively confined to this side 
of the question. 

Those sad-eyed, ghostlike-looking animals called 
lemurs are now, as to their typical forms, confined 
to the island of Madagascar. The fossil species, of 
which Flower and Lydekker enumerate over a dozen, 
are as exclusively confined to the west of Europe and 
North America; and these gentlemen remark, "It is 
very noteworthy that all these types seem to have dis- 
appeared from both regions with the close of the upper 
portion of the Eocene period." 38 

Where they think they existed in the meanwhile, 
during the millions of years from "Eocene times" 



38 "Introduction to Study of Mammals," p. 696. 



19 2 Modern Christianity, and Modern Science, 

down to the "recent," I have no idea. Doubtless that 
old "geological scapegoat," as James Geikie has called 
the imperfection of the record, will have to stand the 
blame, as is usual in such cases; for this strange cus 
torn species have of skipping several formations rep 
resenting a few million years, is quite the ordinary 
thing according to the popular arrangement of the 
fossils, though, as Wallace says, "No one now doubts 
that, where any type appears in two remote periods, 
it must have been in existence during the whole inter- 
vening period, although we may have no record of 
it." 39 

Professor Marsh tells us that he has unearthed with 
his own hands "not less than thirty distinct species 
of the horse tribe in the Tertiary deposits of the west 
alone." 40 But when the whites came here to the New 
World, they were all extinct. No wonder he says, 
on page 32, that "no satisfactory reason for the ex- 
tinction has yet been given!' If we accept the ac- 
count of the Deluge, this has an intelligible mean- 
ing; otherwise it will always be a puzzle. 

But this is only one out of the many problems in 
race distribution that the evolutionist is called upon to 
solve even here in America. As is well known, the 
remains of the mastodon, elephant, and rhinoceros 
are found over nearly all North America. "Why the 
mastodon, elephant, rhinoceros, and especially the 
horse, should have been selected with the huge 
edentates for extinction, and the other ungulates left, 



39 "Distribution of Life," p. 33- 

40 "Introduction and Succession of Vertebrate Life in America." 
PP- 30, 31. 



Biblical Geology. 193 

is at present a mystery, which their somewhat larger 
size hardly explains " 41 

No one but one accustomed to see the huge speci- 
mens of almost all life forms, as found in the rocks, 
drop out of sight and be succeeded by their meager 
and puny descendants or representatives of to-day, 
would ever think of assigning large size as a reason 
for extinction. The unscientific mind would cer- 
tainly expect such types to "persist." Their failure 
to do so seems a strange example indeed of the "sur- 
vival of the fittest." 

And this complete extinction of not less than thirty 
distinct species of horse, Flower and Lydekker ob- 
serve, "is the more remarkable, as, when introduced 
from Europe, the horses that ran wild proved by their 
rapid multiplication in the plains of South America 
and Texas that the climate, food, and other circum- 
stances were highly favorable for their existence. 
The former great abundance of Equidae in America, 
their complete extinction, and their perfect acclimati- 
zation when reintroduced by man, form curious but 
as yet unsolved problems in geographical distribu- 
tion." 42 

Surely a few stubborn facts of this magnitude will 
offset almost any number of objections about it being 
"impossible," in the 4,000 or 5,000 years intervening, 
for the animal forms to become redistributed over the 
world as we find them to-day. 

The Glyptodon, a huge, extinct, South American 
armadillo, over nine feet long, or about as large as a 

"/</., p. 52. 

42 "Introduction to Study of Mammals," pp. 381, 382. 
13 



"> 



194 Modern Christianity and Modern Science, 

rhinoceros, as Wallace says, presents a problem quite 
similar to that of Professor Marsh's animals "of some- 
what larger size," though perhaps some may say that 
it is not particularly connected with geographical dis- 
tribution. 

" 'Why such a form as the Glyptodon should have 
failed to keep his ground is,' as the late Prof. W. R. 
Parker remarks, 'a great mystery; nature seems to 
have built him . . . for eternity/ " 43 

If the problem were only to account for the mysteri- 
ous disappearance of the mammoth, rhinoceros, and 
mastodon, together with "not less than thirty distinct 
species of the horse tribe," from North America, all 
at one time, it would be hard enough for the most in- 
genious uniformitarian to render a plausible explana- 
tion. But when we consider that at this same 
"geological period" similar events were occurring on 
all the other continents, — the huge ground-sloths 
(Megatheriums) and Glyptodons in South America; 
"wombats as large as tapirs," and "kangaroos the size 
of elephants," in Australia; the mammoth and woolly 
rhinoceros in Eurasia ; together with an enormous hip- 
popotamus, as far as England is concerned, to say 
nothing of cave-bears, cave-lions, and cave-hyenas, 
with which, as Dana says, the "modern kinds are 
dwarfs in comparison," all disappearing together at 
this same time, — it becomes almost like a deliberate 
insult to our intellectual honesty to be approached 
with offers of "explanations" based on any so-called 
"natural" action of the forces of nature. But when, 



Id., p. 204. 



Biblical Geology. 195 



in addition to all this, we consider the fact, which is 
now established beyond controversy, that those hu- 
man giants of the caves of western Europe, which 
Dawson calls Palseocosmic (or "ancient-world") men, 
were positively contemporary with the animals men- 
tioned above, and disappeared also with them at this 
same time, it becomes as certain as any other ordi- 
nary scientific fact that our once magnificently-stocked 
world was destroyed by a sudden and awful cata- 
clysm, which the Bible speaks of as "the flood;" and 
with renewed courage and faith we turn again to this 
dear old Book, which has told the same story all these 
centuries. 

Let us now glance again at some of the points we 
have tried to establish in these two chapters on geol- 
ogy:— 

1. The whole science of the modern classification 
of the rocks into successive "ages" rests upon two 
pure assumptions: (a) That the action of the elements 
during all past time has been uniform with the pres- 
ent in character, perhaps in degree; (b) that there has 
been a development, or at least a succession, in the 
life upon the globe. 

2. The first of these assumptions is a point-blank 
denial of the record of the Deluge. 

3. The second being the very backbone of the 
evolution theory, it is preposterous to bring in their 
geology as evidence for evolution. It is "circular" 
reasoning of the most glaring kind. 

4. From the Biblical standpoint this succession of 
life is but the classification or taxonomic series in the 
life of the antediluvian world. 



ig6 Modem Christianity and Modern Science. 

5. The various phenomena of canyons and river 
gorges might reasonably have been accomplished 
within the limits of Biblical time, if the action of the 
elements began when the deposits were soft and 
freshly laid. 

6. The successive strata of coal have not been 
proved, and can not be proved, to have been pro- 
duced by growth in situ. The same may also be said 
of the limestones. On the contrary, both the lime- 
stones and the coal beds often give us unmistakable 
evidence that they were buried or formed suddenly in 
some extraordinary way. 

7. The fossils invariably supply us with specimens 
larger of their kind, and showing a far more complete 

I all-round development, than their modern specific rep- 
resentatives, if they have any, whether crustaceans, 
vertebrate fishes, insects, reptiles, marsupial, or 

jjplacental mammals, or even man. 

8. Many of these relics of ancient life are found to- 
gether in such vast numbers as utterly to preclude 
the supposition that they were accumulated in any 
ordinary way; while they are in just, such position 
and numbers as we might expect if thousands of them 
had been drifted together on the surface of the water 
to the foot-hills of the great mountain ranges, and 
buried there by the storms of the subsiding Deluge. 

9. The numerous examples of the sudden appear- 
ance of species, as well as the numerous breaks in life 
between successive formations, are just what we 
should expect if these arrangements are only taxo- 
nomic classifications in a complete world destroyed at 
one and the same time. 



Biblical Geology. 197 

10. All the "formations," so far as we can judge, 
give us proofs of a milder and more equable climate 
than we have at present. 

ii. All, save the Cambrian and Laurentian, which 
are largely metamorphic, give us very coarse con- 
glomerates, unstratined, angular deposits, or large 
"traveled" boulders, which have usually been at- 
tributed to ice action, with all the involved absurdities 
of something worse than a "rotation of climates.'' 
But all of these phenomena are readily accounted for 
on the hypothesis of a violent and universal Deluge. 

12. The glacial theory, as generally received, in- 
volves so many absurdities that it is pronounced by 
one of the latest and best authorities to be "the wildest 
dream which a fertile imagination ever imported into 
science." 

13. The discovery of well-developed human re- 
mains in Pliocene, perhaps Miocene, strata is one of 
the strongest possible proofs that these names do not 
and can not possibly represent "ages," but simply 
taxonomic classifications in the life of the antedilu- 
vian world. 

14. The lignites and coal seams of the Secondary 
and Tertiary rocks were undoubtedly covered up 
at the same time as the Carboniferous deposits, or 
the "true coal" formations, there being absolutely 
nothing save the visionary succession of life to prove 
that they were not contemporaneous. 

15. In short, the destruction of a whole world of 
magnificently-developed plant and animal life by the 
violent waters of a universal Deluge is seen to be not 
only possible, but scientifically certain. The evidence 



198 Modem Christianity and Modern Science, 

therefore explains the geological phenomena far more 
easily than a century of ingenious guessing along the 
lines of uniformitarianism has done. To plain com- 
mon sense the rocky leaves of nature's dairy are even 
now becoming eloquent to the truth of Genesis, just 
as the monuments of Assyria and Egypt have these 
many years confirmed in thunder tones the truth of 
Old Testament history. 



CHAPTER VII. 

Despairing Darwinism. 

As far as Darwinism pure and simple is concerned., 
it must be already evident to my readers that most 
of the voluminous matter written on the subject, 
both pro and con, is very wide of the mark, so far 
as having any real bearing on the Biblical position 
is concerned. The evolutionists always quietly rule 
the true Biblical position out of court, and formulate 
as its proxy a figment of their own imaginations, 
which is little better than a travesty on Genesis and 
God. Then, having very easily proved this proxy 
to be a liar, they imagine they have demonstrated 
the falsity of at least the first part of the Bible. 

But let it be clearly understood that the real ques- 
tion between Genesis and Darwinism is not whether 
species may not vary in a few million years sufficiently 
to produce practically new and distinct species. The 
fossils show us that species have varied sufficiently 
to produce very distinct morphological or structural 
differences, and in vastly less time than they have 
imagined. Species will vary — have varied. But the 
real question is whether the general run of these 
changes have not all been in the direction of degen- 
eration, not development, degeneration in size (and 
doubtless longevity), in symmetry of structure, and 
in cerebral development. This I can not help regard- 

(199) 



200 Modem Christianity and Modem Science. 

ing as the real fundamental question, and a question 
very easily answered by even a casual reference to 
the fossils, if allowed to tell their story in concert 
instead of in the enforced single file of the geological 
series. A study of embryology will, I believe, lead 
to the same conclusions, if we once dismiss from our 
minds this ever-haunting phantom of phylogenesis 
having any possible bearing on the question. At 
least Weismann has told us "that an investigation into 
the history of degenerate forms often teaches us more 
of the causes of change in organic nature than can 
be learned from the study of the progressive ones." 1 
What is the use of talking about the origin of 
species if geology can not prove that there has actu- 
ally been a succession and general progress in the 
life upon the globe? What if this geological life- 
succession be only the classification series in the life 
of the antediluvian world? Is it worth while talking 
about the development of superior types by natural 
selection during the paltry six thousand years of 
Biblical time? — No one would dream of such a thing. 
Think of the origin of even one of our organs, such 
as the eye, 2 by any process of survival of the more 

1 Nature^ April 18, 1901, p. 590. 

2 "From what I know, through my own specialty, both geome- 
try and experiment, of the structure of lenses and the human eye, 
I do not believe that any amount of evolution, extending through 
any amount of time, consistent with the requirements of our 
astronomical knowledge, could have issued in the production of 
that most beautiful and complicated instrument, the human eye. 
There are too many curved surfaces, too many distances, too many 
densities of the media, each essential to the other, too great a 
facility of ruin by slight disarrangement, to admit of anything 



Despairing Darwinism. 201 

fit during the historic period, no matter how long 
drawn out. Darwin used to say that the thought 
of the origin of the eye gave him a "cold shiver/' 
even with the unlimited time at his command that 
the geologists had taught him to believe in. His 
modern followers would be put into convulsions if 
you limit them to even a hundred thousand years, 
and especially if you do not give them ready made 
their general outline of evolution through geologic 
time. 

And the case is only made the more hopeless for 
them since "Neo-Darwinism," or "pure Darwinism," 
became established. Weismann, in Germany, and 
Wallace and Lankester, in England, are names to 
conjure with to-day in the halls of science; but they 
have felt compelled to fall back on natural selection 
alone as the one and only cause of evolution. They 
claim to have proved that "changes in the individual, 
whether as the effect of the environment or by use 



short of the intervention of an intelligent Will at some stage of the 
evolutionary process. The most perfect, and at the same time the 
most difficult, optical contrivance known, is the powerful achro- 
matic object glass of a microscope; its structure is the long-unhoped- 
for result of the ingenuity of many powerful minds; yet in com- 
plexity and in perfection it falls infinitely below the structure of the 
eye. Disarrange any one of the curvatures of the many surfaces, 
or distances, or densities of the latter, or, worse, disarrange its 
incomprehensible self-adaptive power, the like of which is pos- 
sessed by the handiwork of nothing human, and all the opticians 
in the world could not tell you what is the correlative alteration 
necessary to repair it, and still less to improve it, as natural selec- 
tion is presumed to imply." (Quoted from Thornton, in Wain- 
wright's "Scientific Sophisms," chapter 13, par. 14.) 



202 Modem Christianity and Modem Science. 

and disuse of organs, are not inherited at a//." 3 And 
I believe that most naturalists have accepted this 
idea. But if, with the three or four factors contribut- 
ing to development as Darwin postulated them, they 
could only imagine the development of the higher 
life from the the lower, if granted almost unlimited 
time plus the geological succession of life ready 
made, what would be their "shivering," what their 
despair, if (i) narrowed down to any reasonable time, 
and (2) deprived of their indispensable life-chain, 
and (3) at the same time strictly limited to natural 
selection alone as the sole factor in the process! For 
in the pictures of men and animals on the monuments 
of ancient Egypt, the races and species are so nearly 
identical in all respects with their modern descend- 
ants that the only wonder is how, in the short time 
intervening between that dawn of history and the 
antediluvian age, such surprising changes could have 
taken place from the forms we find fossil in the earth, 
though, as we have seen, these great changes were 
doubtless due to the greatly-changed atmospheric and 
climatic conditions, as well as of food supply, than 
which nothing could be more potent. 

Hence, if I have really established anything in my 
two preceding chapters on geology — and if T have 
not, this whole book is useless and superfluous — it 
will not be expected of me that I should enter into 
a detailed explanation of the possible results of vari- 
ation and the survival of the fittest through their 
unmeasured geological ages, though a general view 
of the subject may not be amiss. 



3 Le Conte's "Evolution and Religious Thought," p. 93. 



Despairing Darwinism. 203 

If we take specimens of the strawberry or the wild 
rose found growing in the fields, we can, by fostering 
care and wise selection of the "fittest," obtain such 
improved varieties as to be scarcely identical, at least 
in appearance, with the forms with which we started. 
But even if we ignore Genesis altogether, and regard 
only the magnificent forms of plant and animal life 
that are embalmed in the rocks, these will be readily 
seen to be only recovering from their degeneration 
and reverting back to the primitive types because 
we have more nearly returned to the primitive con- 
ditions of soil, climate, etc. But even the best we 
can produce must be only approximate reversions, 
for we can only hope to approximate to that glorious 
climate and that vitalizing atmosphere which our 
earth must have had when these magnificent fossil 
forms were embalmed in the rocks as irrefutable 
testimony of the Edenic beginning of our world. 
According to Genesis, those climatic conditions were 
such that no parching drought was ever known, and 
no drenching torrents of rain washed out the most 
valuable plant food from the soil; but in the cool 
twilight hours every separate plant was converted 
into a condenser. The record states that "there 
went up a mist from the earth, and watered the whole 
face of the ground," 4 just as Mr. J. Aitken has told 
us would be the case even to-day if there were no 
dust particles in the air on which the water vapor 
could condense. 

But no one pretends that anything more than 
varieties, i. e., types cross-fertile with their parents, 



4 Genesis 2 : 6. 



204 Modern Christianity and Modern Science. 

have ever been produced and perpetuated by any action 
of natural or even artificial selection within the his- 
toric period. Hybrids can in some cases be produced 
by perverting or deceiving natural instincts in animals, 
or by forced fertilization in plants; but hybrids are 
either sterile or speedily revert to one of the parent 
types, and then where is the commencing species? 
You can, by patient and very close breeding, produce 
types as utterly unlike as pug and greyhound among 
dogs, or carrier and tumbler among pigeons. But 
then, very close breeding weakens the stock, especially 
in fertility, while judicious crossing of diverse types 
strengthens the stock and increases its fertility ; that is, 
though the above-mentioned varieties are so utterly 
unlike in appearance, they are perfectly cross-fertile, 
and their progeny speedily tend to become uniform 
or homogeneous if left wild, as in a state of nature. 
On the other hand, the horse and the ass, though al- 
most infinitely more alike to outward appearance, will 
not cross in a state of nature, and when induced to do 
so by man, produce a hybrid that is perfectly sterile. 
In Huxley's very candid letter to Charles Kingsley 
he says : — 

"If Carrier and Tumbler were physiological species 
equivalent to horse and ass, their progeny ought to 
be sterile or semi-sterile. So far as experience has 
gone, on the contrary, it is perfectly fertile. . . . 
It has been obvious to me that this is the weak point 
of Darwin's doctrine. He has shown that selective 
breeding is a vera causa for morphological species ; he 
has not shown it a vera causa for physiological 
species." 5 



5 "Life and Letters," 1900, vol. 1, p. 239. 



Despairing Darwinism. 205 

This is the way all through nature, so that, al- 
though Professor Huxley has told us elsewhere, "I 
adopt Mr. Darwin's hypothesis, therefore, subject to 
the production of proof that physiological species 
may be produced by selective breeding," yet we 
know that this long-desired "proof" is still eloquent 
by its absence, though for nearly half a century the 
thousands of biologists have been ransacking every 
corner of the globe to find it. In fact, most scientists 
candidly acknowledge that, however "plastic" they 
may imagine them to have been in the past, species 
are now fixed within certain limits, beyond which we 
have never yet been able to carry any product of 
variation. 

Mr. Darwin has, by his ingenious theory of sexual 
selection among animals, and insect selection in plants, 
given a plausible explanation for beauty among the 
higher forms. But the lower forms of all organisms, 
plants or animals, and through which they say all the 
higher forms have come, are a-sexual or hermaphro- 
dites ; and these comprise the vast majority of all living 
forms. But here Mr. Darwin's ingenious explana- 
tions are powerless, for "the most gorgeous beauty 
is lavishly distributed, even among the lowest ani- 
mals, such as marine shells and polyps, where no 
such explanation is possible. The process by which 
such beauty is originated and intensified is wholly 
unknown to us." 6 

Again, how did the a-sexual, or unisexual, methods 
of reproduction pass into the bisexual, or the mar- 
velous complications of the placental system and the 



6 Le Conte, "Evolution and Religious Thought," p. 270. 



2o6 Modern Christianity and Modern Science. 

mammalian method of fostering the helpless infant 
by the parental milk? Two learned English authors 
have, I believe, tried to tell "how" in a large octavo 
volume of several hundred pages ; it could not well be 
made plausible in less. As an eloquent writer de- 
clares, "God creates a new thing in the earth when 
He hangs the nursling on the mother's breast, and 
bids the two be as one." 7 



7 As illustrating some of the problems involved in the doctrine of 
survival of the fittest, which is only a recondite way of denying 
design in nature, take the following from Professor Owen: "The 
new-born kangaroo is an inch in length, naked, blind, with very 
rudimentary limbs and tail. In one which I examined the morning 
after the birth, I could discern no act of sucking; it hung, like a 
germ, from the end of the long nipple, and seemed unable to draw 
sustenance therefrom by its own efforts. The mother accordingly 
is provided with a peculiar adaptation of a muscle (cremaster) to 
the mammary gland, by which she can inject the milk from the 
nipple into the mouth of the pendulous embryo. Were the larynx 
of the little creature like that of the parent, the milk might, prob- 
ably would, enter the windpipe and cause suffocation; but the 
foetal larynx is cone-shaped, with the opening at the apex, which 
projects, as in the whale tribe, into the back aperture of the nos- 
trils, where it is closely embraced by the muscles of the 'soft 
palate.' The air passage is thus completely separated from the 
fauces, and the injected milk passes in a divided stream, on either 
side of the base of the larynx, into the oesophagus. These corre- 
lated modifications of maternal and foetal structures, designed 
with especial reference to the peculiar conditions of both mother 
and offspring, afford, as it seems to me, irrefragable evidence of 
creative foresight. 

"The parts of this apparatus can not have produced one another; 
one part is in the mother, another part in the young one; without 
their harmony they could not be effective; but nothing except Re- 
sign can operate to make them harmonious. They are intended 'to 
work together, and we can not resist the conviction of this inten- 
tion when the facts first come before us." (Quoted in Wain- 
wright's "Scientific Sophisms," chapter 13, par. 12.) 



Despairing Darwinism. 207 

But St. George Mivart has put the climax on this 
line of argument when he asks how natural selection 
is to explain the very first steps of advance toward 
usefulness. "An organ must be already useful before 
natural selection can take hold of it to improve it. 
IFcan not make it useful, but only more useful. For 
example, if fins commenced as buds from the trunk, 
it is difficult to see how they could be of any use, and 
therefore how they could be improved by natural 
selection until they were of considerable size, and 
especially until muscles were developed to move 
them. Until that time they would seem to be a hin- 
drance, to be removed by natural selection, instead of 
a use to be preserved and improved"* 

This last is the enigma thrown out for those to solve 
who believe in natural selection as the one and only 
factor in organic evolution. 

For, about 1887, when the writings of Professor 
Weismann began to make it evident that acquired 
characters are not inherited, the believers in evolution 
became divided into two opposing schools, and started 
what we may venture to call the modern scientific 
civil war. And while victory is certainly inclining 
more and more to the side of the followers of Weis- 
mann, assured peace is not yet in sight. 

The "Neo-Darwinians" not only say that no actual 
example proving the undoubted transmission of ac- 
quired characters has ever been adduced, but they give 
examples where such an idea would be absurd. In 
the case of bees and other insects it is the "neuters" 



8 Le Conte's "Evolution and Religious Thought," p. 271; 
D. Appleton & Co., 1899. 



208 Modern Christianity and Modern Science. 

which do all the work, while the real fathers do not 
work at all; neither does the mother; and yet the 
newly-hatched offspring are perfect architects from the 
start. "In many species of ants there are two, and 
in the leaf-cutting ants of Brazil there are three, kinds 
of neuters, which differ from each other and from 
their male and female ancestors to an almost incred- 
ible degree." 9 They then argue that, since these strik- 
ing examples of complicated structures and wonderful 
instincts have been produced "without the aid of use 
inheritance — nay, in spite of its utmost opposition" — 
why should we suppose that the latter has played any 
part in the production of other organisms? 

On the other hand, the "Neo-Lamarckians" argue 
that the influence of environment and the effects of 
use and disuse "must be true factors, because there was 
a time when there were no others." 10 And they show, 
as in the above-quoted argument of Mivart, that 
natural selection can never explain the first steps in 
the advance toward usefulness. "An organ must be 
already useful before natural selection can take hold 
of it to improve it." And, of course, this insuperable 
difficulty looms up in the case of every separate organ 
of every organic type. 

But, between the two of them, what is there left of 
Darwin's doctrine, anyway? 

If an individual positively can not transmit to his 
posterity what he has acquired in his lifetime, how can 
he transmit what he has not even got himself, and 
what none of his ancestors ever had? 



9 Ball's "Use and Disuse," p. 15, American reprint. 
10 "Evolution and Religious Thought," p. 94. 



Despairing Darwinism. 209 

Or, if natural selection can not start a single organ 
of a single type, what is the use of talking about its 
supposed ability to improve them after the machinery 
is all built? 

No wonder Sir William Dawson could say in 1891 
that "Darwinism seems to have entered on a process 
of disintegration;" 11 or that Dr. Stolzle, of the Univer- 
sity of Wiirzburg, whose "careful and scholarly" work 
is reviewed in a recent number of Nature, 1 * can say 
that "Darwinism, for scientific circles at least, is at its 
last gasp. Weismann, the toughest champion of 
Darwinism, can now write over all his works devoted 
to the rescue of the selection principle, 'In vanum 
laboravimusf " 

We can now better understand Mr. Spencer's style 
of argument, already referred to in the previous chap- 
ter, that, "before it can be ascertained how organized 
beings have been gradually evolved, there must be 
reached the conviction that they have been gradually 
evolved." They reached the general outline of this 
preliminary "conviction" nearly a hundred years ago, 
when the geologists invented the idea of a succession 
of life on the globe; and the last fifty years or so has 
been devoted to ascertaining "how" this remarkable 
phenomenon has come about, trying to "reconcile the 
facts" of biology with the "ascertained succession in 
geological time." Since the transmission of acquired 
characters and natural selection alike fail, one would 
think that all possible explanations of the "hozv" were 
about exhausted. But with the preliminary convic- 

11 "Modern Ideas of Evolution," p. 12. 
12 Nov. 28, 1901, pp. 76, 77. 

14 



210 Modem Christianity and Modern Science. 

tion strong within them, we still see a few groping 
about after some "unknown factor," some internal 
tendency to progress, about as scientific as Topsy's 
" 'Specks I growed." 

Behold the sad results of trusting to human reason 
for these hundred years above the Word of the infinite 
God! 

" Dr. Alfred Russell Wallace, who is almost a prince 
among English scientists, is quite sure that man, at 
least, must present positive exceptions to the theory 
of evolution. "The hand of man," he tells us, "con- 
tains latent capacities and powers which are unused 
by savages, and must have been even less used by 
palaeolithic man and his still ruder predecessors. It 
has all the appearance of an organ prepared for the 
use of civilized man, and one which was required to 
render civilization possible." 

Also, in speaking of the "wonderful power, range, 
flexibility, and sweetness of the musical sounds pro- 
ducible by the human larynx," he says: "The habits 
of savages give no indication of how this faculty 
could have been developed. . . . The singing 
of savages is a more or less monotonous howling, 
and the females seldom sing at all." "It seems as if 
the organ had been prepared in anticipation of the 
future progress of man, since it contains latent ca- 
pacities which are useless to him in his earlier condi- 
tion." 13 



13 Quoted in "Scientific Sophisms," chapter 12, par. 20. 

I know not whether Dr. Wallace has, of late years, reversed any 
of these statements about man's physical frame, as so many others 
have done, but I know that he still holds that man's mental facul- 



Despairing Darzvinism. 211 

The illustrious Dr. Rudol f Virchow^pf Berlin, has /• c j f 
long been known as uncompromisingly opposed to /* <- ^ 
calling evolution scientific. At the conference of the 
Association of German Naturalists and Physicians at 
Munich, 1877, he declared, "We can not teach, we 
can not pronounce it to be a conquest of science, that 
man descends from the ape or any other animal." 

More recently we have another German, Professor 
Klaatsch, of Heidelberg, declaring at the late con- 
gress of German anthropologists at Halle (Oct. 15, 
1900), that the hypothesis of the direct descent of 
man from apes was "no longer tenable." 

Nor would I forget to mention the brilliant address 
of Lord Salisbury, then president of the British Associ- 
ation, delivered before that body at Oxford, in 1894, 
in which he propounded some good problems for evo- 
lutionists to think over. 

I must, however, conclude these rambling cita- 
tions with another from the late lamented Mivart, 
who died under the excommunication of the Roman 
Church because he could not bring his sense of justice 
to assent to the horrible doctrine of eternal torture. 
We have already shown in the first chapter that true 
Christianity is under no obligation to those myriad 



ties can not possibly be the product of evolution, though it is a 
great pity if, as seems to be the case, he has only clung to this 
because of his well-known interest in Spiritism. 

Dr. Virchow (quoted above), though I understand himself not a 
believer in divine revelation, is a striking example of one of the 
very foremost scientists of the world still holding out against evo- 
lution by demanding more positive evidence than its advocates 
have ever been able to supply, even with all their geological 
"ages" taken as actual facts. 



212 Modern Christianity and Modern Science. 

writers who have gratuitously created needless dif- 
ficulties for the scientists by claiming that man must 
have an immortal soul, a double that survives the 
death of the organism that we call the brain and nerv- 
ous system, which is evidently in some mysterious 
way the physical basis of thought and mind. It 
would be needless for me to say that I can not con- 
ceive of the human mind apart from an organism of 
some kind, though I do not mean to say it must be 
matter. "There is a natural body, and there is a spir- 
itual body." The Scriptures teach a hope in the future 
life only through a resurrection and glorification of 
our present bodily and physical organism; and the 
church in all its purest ages has contemplated the 
future only in the light of this blessed assurance of 
the resurrection. Perhaps no other one doctrine 
among the thousands of parodies that have been 
palmed oft* on a credulous world as Christianity has 
confirmed so many in unbelief as this hypothetical 
immortal soul and its final corollary, the God- 
dishonoring doctrine of eternal torture. 

The quotation that I give below from Professor 
Mivart is taken from one of his earlier writings, in 
which he pronounced Mr. Darwin's "Origin of Spe- 
cies" to be a "puerile hypothesis," and its distinctive 
characteristic "a conception utterly irrational." 
However, I regret to say that some years later, over- 
powered by numbers, he went over to the side of the 
Darwinians, and, as I mentioned above, died under 
the ban of the Catholic Church. 

But this was his conclusion in the seventies of the 
late century: — 



Despairing Darwinism. 213 

"Thus, then, in our judgment, the author of the 
'Descent of Man' has utterly failed in the only part 
of his work that is really important; . . . and if 
Mr. Darwin's failure should lead to an increase of 
philosophic culture on the part of physicists, we may 
therein find some consolation for the injurious effects 
which his work is likely to produce on too many of 
our half-educated classes." 14 

Thus even among that very large class who had 
unconsciously, in assenting to the guesses of the ge- 
ologists as to the past history of our globe, admitted 
the main outline of the evolution theory, there are 
many of our leading scientists who can not force 
their common sense to all its frightful conclusions. 
But what if it can be shown that still another fallacy 
has crept into the first stages of the process? Would 
it not render the whole thing one of the most astonish-, 
ing exhibitions of the gullibility of the human mind., 
and illustrate Mr. P. T. Barnum's famous maxim that 

I shall now try to show where I think this other 
unscientific assumption has worked into the chain 
of evidence, in addition to the unwarranted guessing 
about the geological succession. As we have already 
said, it is only when we look at the history of organic 
forms since the culminating types were laid down for 
us in their rocky beds, whether we hear them in con- 
cert, or even in single file, as the geologists prefer, 
that we may get any adequate conception of how 
variation has acted in the long run. Scientists always 



14 Quoted in "Scientific Sophisms," chapter 12, sec. 20. 



214 Modern Christianity and Modem Science. 

reason that if variation is practically unlimited, nat- 
ural selection will tend to secure the transmission of 
organs or types more useful or more fitted to sur- 
vive. And we should naturally think that the full 
development by use of any organ would be likely 
to be transmitted to the offspring, Weismann and 
the others to the contrary notwithstanding. But it 
seems to me that if we reason that a fierce struggle 
for existence would tend in general to develop a 
higher organism, or one more perfectly fitted for the 
contest of life with the environment, this is only as- 
suming in addition that hardship in general zvill tend 
to develop the Uner points of the organism — and this 
whether acquired characters are transmitted or not. 
It might — nay, I may say that we know that it does — 
do so in man; for it is in the northern climates that 
man has perfected modern civilization. A too easy 
or pleasant environment in man results in degenera- 
tion; hardship tends to draw out his better qualities, 
mental and moral at least, though, as we shall see, 
perhaps not the physical. As Pope in his familiar 
lines declares, it was for the best interests of the hu- 
man race that the Creator — 

"Called for a cloud to darken all their years, 
And said, 'Go, spend them in a vale of tears.' " 

But just here we must reason carefully. This is 
only true of man in relation to his mental and moral 
nature, or after what the evolutionists call the "ra- 
tional factor," has come in. Hardship is not in itself 
good for man's physical development, except in so 
far as benefit results indirectly from stimulating his 
mental and moral nature, and thus reacting on the 



Despairing Darwinism. 215 

physical, enabling him to provide a better environ- 
ment for himself, and at the same lime inspiring him 
to discard those vices of a luxurious environment 
which tend to degeneration. It is only man's prone- 
ness to these vices which keeps him from receiving 
only benefit from the utmost favorable environment, 
as do plants and animals. The latter are not thus 
ensnared by enervating moral and physical habits 
resulting from opportunity; but when all nature 
favors and smiles upon them they develop according 
to the full law of their heredity. 

But when the lines of their environment become 
hard and stern, which they have always said are the 
conditions most favorable for inducing or perpetuat- 
ing variations, they have no mind or will power that, 
by seeing a distant goal for effort, can rise superior 
to present circumstances, and thus make of their hard 
lot stepping-stones "to higher things." There is 
only an effort as far as possible to avoid present evil 
consequences by fleeing these dangers and hardships, 
or a blind submission when compelled to yield. In 
the pitiless struggle for existence, which is one of the 
present sad conditions of our fallen world, the strong- 
est, the swiftest, or the most cunning may indeed 
survive; but the question is, In the case of the varia- 
tions induced or perpetuated by an unsuitable environ- 
ment, such as of food, climate, etc., is the sum total of 
these changes in the direction of a more perfect de- 
velopment or the reverse? Surely we must acknowl- 
edge that, whatever it may do in the way of developing 
special organs or senses to counteract these changed 
conditions, yet, in its general results, its sum total 



216 Modern Christianity and Modern Science. 

of effects, it must and can only tend toward degenera- 
tion in size and ideal symmetry of structure, as well 
as decrease of longevity and vitality. Hardship in 
either plants or animals does .not develops it degrades. 

We thus see that this survival of the fittest would at 
the most only delay or partly neutralize the natural 
tendency of a hard environment to bring about de- 
generation of the type, all favorable variations being 
only so many makeshifts to counteract as far as pos- 
sible this general tendency downward. It is certainly 
not in the crowded centers of plant or animal life, 
where the struggle for existence is no metaphor, but 
an actual reality, that we naturally look for the high- 
est types of any given species. 15 Changes in plenty 
may be induced and perpetuated in the direction of 
adaptation to their environment, but such changes 
would be only makeshifts, and only approximately 
tend to avoid the inevitable degeneration resulting 
from unfavorable conditions. 

And, looking at this matter a little more closely, 
it is seen to follow inevitably as a corollary from the 
doctrine of the conservation of energy, which is only 
the scientific statement of the fact that, as far as our 
world is concerned, creation is complete; or, as de- 
clared nearly 2,000 years ago, "The works were fin- 
ished from the foundation of the world." 16 We can 
neither create power nor destroy it, though, as they 
say, we can lose it, at least as far as this world is con- 



15 Sir William Dawson, who, of course, was no mean scientist, 
argues in his " Origin of the World," p. 228, that the struggle for 
existence "will give chiefly depauperated and degraded forms" 

16 Hebrews 4:3. 



Despairing Darwinism. 217 

cerned. The vast energy that comes streaming to our 
earth from the sun is transmuted back and forth in 
a thousand ways, though little by little infinite space 
steals it from us, and we are dependent again upon a 
fresh supply from the ever-replenished fountain. 

Just so, though only in a more ideal sense, is it with 
regard to what I may venture to call vital energy — 
omne vivum e vivo (life only from antecedent life). 
Not only so, but omnis cellitla e cellula is now equally 
well established; one kind of cell can only originate 
from a similar antecedent cell. As a noted biologist 
has declared: "The cells from which the optic nerve, 
for example, is developed, can not be developed into 
the auditory nerve, nor cells from which the auditory 
nerve is developed, into the optic nerve." "One kind 
of cells can not give origin to another kind of different 
endowments." 17 

But we also know that cells or organisms are subject 
to degeneracy and decay. They can not acquire 
higher powers, though they may gradually lose what 
they already have. Water very readily runs down- 
hill, but not uphill without a sufficient head behind it. 
Just so with vital types. It was the great French 
anthropologist M. Quatrefages, was it not, who re- 
marked that science had not yet explained how "an 
ancestor can transmit to his posterity what he has not 
got himself" ? Not only so, but he can not always 



17 "The Evolution of the Human Race from Apes," etc., p. 28. 
By Thomas Wharton Jones, F. R. S. He was Huxley's instruc- 
tor in physiology at Charing Cross Hospital, and of him Huxley 
says: "I do not know that I ever felt so much respect for a teacher 
before or since." — Life and Letters, vol. 1, p. 21. 



218 Modern Christianity and Modern Science. 

transmit all that he himself actually possesses of na- 
ture's gifts. Vitality becomes lessened, and the type 
degenerates. Weismann has made great use of this 
idea in his doctrine of "Panmixia," or the withdrawal 
of selection, which always results in degeneracy. Se- 
lection may serve to counteract this tendency, but only 
approximately. As Dawson says, "All things left to 
themselves tend to degenerate."™ Little by little the 
endowment of vitality bestowed upon our world at the 
beginning has, like radiant energy, been returned to 
God who gave it; but, unlike radiant energy, He has 
established no regular source of supply from without, 
no elixir of life for creation in general. As the indi- 
vidual grows old and dies, so do species degenerate 
and become extinct. The glorious flood of vitality, 
so liberally showered upon our world in the beginning, 
has been ebbing lower and lower ; and the doctrine of 
organic nature steadily advancing from the lower to 
the higher is seen to be as puerile as the old idea of cre- 
ating energy by perpetual motion machinery — and a 
mistake of precisely the same nature. Both are con- 
tradicted by the magnificent law of the conservation 
of energy, which, as we have said, is only the scientific 
statement of the scriptural idea, long ago declared, 
that, as far as our world and system go, creation is 
complete; though, as the "wages of sin," death has 
been decreed upon the individual, and degeneration 
more or less marked upon every vital type. 

And this view of nature in general is made absolutely 
certain by an appeal to the rocks. When we regard 



"Modern Ideas of Evolution," p. 250. 



Despairing Darwinism. 2 1 9 

all the fossils older than the "recent" as contemporary 
with one another, and begin to compare them with 
their puny, degenerate descendants, whether among 
the mollusks, reptiles, mammals, or even any variety 
of plant life, we are always met with the testimony 
that degeneration has marked the history of every 
living form since the Deluge; and who can picture 
the extent of this degeneration that even the fossils 
must present since those happy days of peace when 
the Creator, looking upon the finished product of 
His work, "took delight/' and pronounced them 
"very good" — no briars or thorns; no parasites; no 
animal form living at the expense of its fellows' lives; 
no sickness or suffering; no death throughout man's 
whole dominion; because man himself was in har- 
mony with his Creator? But man rebelled against 
his God, and all nature witnessed to him of his fall, 
weeping in mute sympathy with his remorse. A 
ceaseless struggle for the supremacy, for even exist- 
ence, was introduced, the "conception" or generat- 
ing power of the females of all creation being greatly 
"multiplied" 19 to compensate for this abnormal war- 
fare. And every such struggle, at the expense of its 
fellows' comfort or lives, as it generally is, must de- 
grade, because contrary to God's original purpose of 
universal peace and harmony for all nature. The 
"toolh-and-claw" phase of nature is not the normal 
but an abnormal state of things, and hence must de- 
grade even those that survive. 

But species have not only been degenerating, as 



19 Genesis 3:16. 



220 Modem Christianity and Modern Science. 

we have said, in size (and doubtless in longevity), in 
symmetry of structure, and in cerebral development 
(among the higher forms), but countless species are 
gone altogether, leaving no descendants. 

"From scarped cliff and quarried stone 
She cries, 'A thousand types are gone, 
I care for nothing, all shall go.' " 

Even within the historic period hundreds of beau- 
tiful plant and animal forms that the Creator placed 
upon the earth to beautify the landscape and enjoy 
the. free air of heaven, have been extinguished by the 
greed and cruelty of man. The fossils of the past, 
the developing embryos of the present, as well as 
our own experience within the historic period, with 
one voice testify that degeneration and decay have 
marked the history of every living form. Just as the 
individual grows old and dies, so do species degen- 
erate and become extinct. 

Mr. George Ticknor Curtis, in his splendidly- 
reasoned book "Creation or Evolution?" has given 
a reductio ad absurdum along this line, illustrating 
the limits of variation, that is too good to omit, even 
though quite long: — 

"If the theory that the different species of animals 
now known to us have been evolved successively by 
descent from some primordial simplest form, through 
modifications induced by change of habitation, of 
medium of life, and accumulation of new structures 
occurring through an immense period of time, be a 
sound hypothesis, the process which has evolved su- 
perior out of inferior organizations ought, in con- 
sistency with itself and with all its supposed condi- 



Despairing Darwinism. 221 

tions, to be capable of being reversed, so as to lead 
to the evolution of inferior out of superior organ- 
isms. For, although the doctrine of evolution has 
thus far been applied only to facts which are sup- 
posed to show an ascent in the scale of being, the 
argument ought to be equally good for a descent in 
the scale of being, provided we take care to include 
all the elements and causes of a change of structure, 
mode and medium of life, and the necessary element 
of time, in the operation of the process. The im- 
aginary case that is about to be put shall include all 
the elements of the evolutionary hypothesis, and will 
serve to test at least the rationality of that theory. 

"Let it be supposed, then, that there was a period 
in the history of this earth when the whole human 
race, however it originated, was confined to an island, 
thousands of miles from any other land. This race 
of men, adapted to a life in one medium, the air, may 
be supposed to have so far advanced in the ruder arts 
of hunting and fishing, and in the higher art of tillage, 
as to be able for many generations to support life by 
what the sea and the land would put within their 
reach, and by the product which their rude agricul- 
ture could extract from the soil, or which the soil 
would spontaneously yield. But as the centuries flow 
on, the population begins to press upon the resources 
of the territory, and the struggle for life becomes 
very great. At length a point is reached where the 
supply of food from the land becomes inadequate to 
sustain the population, and what can be made up 
from the sea will not supply the deficiency. The 
population will then slowly decrease; but, while this 



222 Modem Christianity and Modern Science. 

decrease goes on, there conies in a disturbing cause 
which will prevent any adjustment of the supply of 
food to the diminished number of the consumers. 
The sea begins by almost imperceptible, but steadily 
progressing, encroachments to diminish the area of 
dry land; a change of climate reduces the number of 
other animals available for human food, and reduces 
the productive capacity* of the earth. Then ensues 
that struggle for existence which is supposed to entail 
changes of medium of life, and to induce transfor- 
mations of structure. The conditions of existence 
have become wholly changed. The wretched de- 
scendants of a once comparatively thriving race are 
dwelling on a territory which has become a marsh. 
They have no means of migrating to another terri- 
tory; they can only migrate to another medium. 
They begin by feeding exclusively on what the water 
will afford. They pass their lives in the pursuit of 
a prey which lives only in the water, and in this 
change of life they acquire or develop organs adapted 
to the new condition, organs which, in such miser- 
able reproduction of their own species as can go on, 
they transmit to their offspring. Modifications upcn 
modifications accumulate in this way through untold 
periods of time, until at last a new aquatic or a new 
amphibious creature is formed, and the difference be- 
tween that creature and his remote ancestral human 
stock is as great as that between man and the seal, 
or between man and any fish that swims. Still, 
there will be peculiarities of structure retained, which 
might lead any inhabitant of another world, alight- 
ing on this globe and undertaking to trace the origin 



Despairing Darwinism. 223 

of this new creature, to the supposition that he was 
akin to a race of men whose fossil remains he might 
find buried in some stratum beneath the marsh, which 
was the last habitat of this unfortunate race, when it 
had all the characteristics of its original type. 

"Is it conceivable that this transformation could 
take place? Could such a condition and situation re- 
sult in anything but the utter extinction of the hu- 
man race, or, in other words, in an absolute break?" 

"But now let us go a step further in this imaginary 
case. Let us suppose that after this new creature, 
fish or amphibian, descended from the human race, 
lias inhabited the water surrounding the ill-fated 
island for a million of years, another great change 
takes place. The water begins to recede from the 
land by gradations as slow as those by which in the 
former period it encroached. The land rises from 
the low level to which it had sunk, by volcanic action. 
Forests spring up upon the sides of the mountains. 
The soil becomes firm; verdure overspreads the fields; 
the climate grows genial; the wilderness blossoms 
as the rose. Allow another million years for this 
restoration of the territory to an inhabitable condi- 
tion. Slowly and in an unbroken series of genera- 
tions the aquatic creatures, descended from the an- 
cient human inhabitants of the island, emerge from 
the sea and betake themselves to the land. Modifica- 
tions upon modifications accumulate; new organs are 
acquired; the survival of the fittest perpetuates them; 
the animals ascend in the scale of being, until the 
human type is again evolved out of the degraded, 
descendants of the population, which two million 



224 Modem Christianity and Modern Science. 

of years previously dwelt as men upon the island, and 
carried on in some primitive fashion the simpler arts 
of human life. Is not this just as supposable as the 
evolution of the human race out of some lower form 
of organism? Are not all the elements, — time, mi 
gration from one medium to another, change of con- 
ditions, and what is supposed to lead to the produc- 
tion of different organisms, — just as powerful to pro- 
duce the inferior out of the superior as to produce the 
superior out of the inferior, and so on interchange- 
ably, The answer in each case is that all such modi- 
fication in the animal kingdom is limited; that when 
once a distinct species is in existence, we have no evi- 
dence that it loses its distinctive type or merges itself 
in another, although the earth may be full of evidence 
that types which formerly existed are no longer 
among the living organisms." 20 

Like the fossil remains of the lower animals, the 
general results of discovery of the remains of palaeo- 
cosmic man give us pictures of degeneration since, 
not development. They have found nothing which, 
to my mind, gives any weight of argument against 
the Biblical picture of the antediluvians as a race wi f h 
magnificent physical and mental powers, though de- 

20 "Creation or Evolution," pp. 252-256; D. Appleton & Co., 
1889. I would commend the logical exactness of this book to 
those of my readers who have grown tired of the slipshod 
methods of "proving" things so common in most of our scientific 
works. If Mr. Curtis had not tacitly conceded to the evolutionists 
all their geological absurdities, and had not also burdened his 
pages with the hopeless and wholly gratuitous task of proving an 
immortal soul for man, such a book as this of mine would be 
largely superfluous. 



Despairing Darwinism. 225 

graded in morals and habits; that they existed in 
such a luxurious condition of climate and natural sur- 
roundings as to make agriculture comparatively use- 
less, as it is even now in all semitropical countries;' 
that they had no written language; that with their 
long lives and retentive memories, and at only a few 
generations, as generations then counted, from the 
creation, they might be immoral, and in their outly- 
ing tribes, as in western Europe, even vile and bestial 
in their habits, but in body and brain showing evi- 
dence of their heritage of physical and mental health. 
I have already referred to this subject in the pre- 
vious chapter, and can do little more here. Of 
course, there have been found many rude specimens 
of our species of ancient times, and countless prim- 
itive weapons and implements, which they always 
assume must prove the barbarous, almost bestial, 
character of their authors. But right along with 
these, and doubtless of about the same age, are found 
the magnificently-developed beings of Cro-Magnon 
and Mentone, strong of limb and large of brain. 
"Their cranial capacity was above that of average 
Europeans of the present day." 21 

21 From the "Hunterian Oration," delivered in the theater of the 
Royal College of Surgeons of England on Feb. 14, 1901, by Mr. 
N. C. Macnamara, and reported in Nature, March 7, 1901, pp. 
454-458. For the latest and best book on this subject that I know 
of I would refer the reader to "The Meeting-place of Geology and 
History," by Sir J. William Dawson, LL. D., F. R. S.; Flem- 
ming H. Re veil Co., 1894. 

It would be altogether foreign to my purpose to go into the 
details of this subject of primitive man. I can only give three 
quotations, which will serve to illustrate the Scripture statement 
that " there were giants in the earth in those days": — 
15 



226 Modern Christianity and Modern Science. 

Some of these ancient men, like the old man of 
Cro-Magnon, had lived to such an extreme age that, 
though every tooth was sound, they had been worn 

"More recent discoveries at Mentone have confirmed the con- 
clusion that this man really represents a race of giants, some of 
them seven feet high, who inhabited southern Europe in the pal- 
anthropic age." — Meeting-place of Geology and History, p. 58. 

"The Cro-Magnon race has a brain-case of more than ordinary 
capacity, a more elevated forehead [than the Constadt race], and 
eye-sockets singularly elongated horizontally. Broca has measured 
the cubic contents of the Cro-Magnon skull, and gives as the 
result 1,590 cubic centimeters, or 119 centimeters more than the 
average of 125 modern Parisian skulls. The Constadt men were 
of moderate stature, but strongly built and muscular. The Cro- 
Magnon race was of great stature, some skeletons approaching to 
seven feet in height, and affording evidence of immense muscular 
development." — Id., pp. 81-83. 

Mr. Macnamara, also, in the lecture quoted from above, speaks 
of the great stature of these people buried in the caves, and re- 
marks that "arace of giants in far-distant times was no myth." 
But when, in following his one criterion of craniology, he assigns 
to "the same race" the similarly well-developed skulls found in 
the famous long dolmens of England and other parts of western 
Europe, he is at least very misleading, if not flying in the very 
face of the geological evidence. For nothing is more evident than 
the distinct break or difference in fauna, climate, and area of 
land surface, between those men of the "Mammoth Age" and the 
men of the long dolmens or temple-tombs, caused by what the 
geologists are pleased to term the last great submergence of 
western Europe. As Dawson says, " No geological fact can be 
better established than the post-glacial subsidence." — Meeting- 
place, etc., p. 88. And this "subsidence," which, of course, 
means the Flood of Noah, intervenes between "Palaeocosmic" 
and "Neocosmic man," as Dawson calls them. Of course, it is 
but natural that the earliest races after the flood should resemble 
in their skulls the more worthy types of the antediluvians, though 
in physique we are told they were "of feeble build" and "short 
stature." — Dawson, Meeting-place, etc., p. 103. 



Despairing Darwinism. 227 

down to the very sockets. The extreme antiquity 
of these skeletons is beyond question, and only by 
reasoning in a circle can the archaeologists prove 
that they are not as old or even older than many of 
the rude or degraded specimens that they are con- 
stantly holding up before us as our primitive ances- 
tors. Indeed, from this new view of geology, the 
presumption is that the Cro-Magnon and Mentone 
types are really older than the more bestial — "more 
simian" ones, as they call them — for the former were 
certainly buried carefully by their friends before the 
Deluge; while many of the latter, found as they are 
in the river gravels, were doubtless destroyed by the 
waters that were sent to stop them from further dis- 
honoring the name and degrading the image of their 
Maker. 

Following the lead of Thomsen and the other 
Danish archaeologists, modern scientists have been 
in the habit of classifying ancient human remains into 
the Stone Age, the Bronze Age, and the Iron Age, 
with various subdivisions. These different "ages" 
are based on about the same general arguments as 
the geological ones, and are about as scientific. But 
though it has been so frequently pointed out that the 
Stone Age does not mark any fixed period of human 
history, that some tribes may be using stone while 
others not very far away may be in a high stage of 
civilization, and that, from the standpoint of metal- 
lurgy, as Mr. John Percy and Colonel Tschering have 
pointed out, the Iron Age 22 should precede that of 



22 Mr. H. R. Hall, of the British Museum, who is an authority 
on Egyptian antiquities, in his recent work on "The Oldest Civ- 



228 Modem Christianity and Modern Science. 

bronze, not follow it, still the whole arrangement fits 
into their preconceived ideas of evolution, and they 
think it is good enough as a "working hypothesis." 
"According to the brilliant researches of Dr. Schlie- 
mann at Hissarlik, the site of ancient Troy, and at 
Mycenae,, there was neither a Stone Age nor a Metal 
Age in Greece and Asia Minor. More than this, the 
arguments that the evolution school of archaeology 
has based on the development of civilization, as at- 
tested by the alleged gradual transition from the use 
of stone to that of bronze, and from bronze to iron, 
are here decidedly negatived. In the finds at Troy 
especially there is the most striking evidence of dev- 
olution, or degeneration, of the inhabitants who 
successively occupied this historic spot. Here, as 
well as at Mycenae, the ornaments and implements 
discovered, even in the lowest strata, far from indi- 
cating a state of savagery and utter degradation, be- 
token one of high civilization, and of as thorough 
an acquaintance with the working of metals and the 
facile arts as was displayed at subsequent periods. 
In the light of Schliemann's discoveries, not to speak 
of others pointing in the same direction, made in 



ilization of Greece," shows that, "contrary to the usually accepted 
view, iron was already known to the Egyptians about B. C. 3500, 
when, as he says (see p. 198), 'it appears named and depicted 
on the monuments in a manner which admits of no possibility of 
doubt as to its nature.' He supports his statements by quota- 
tions from a learned article by the Swedish Egyptologist, Profes- 
sor Pichl, . . . from which it may be safely concluded that 
the Egyptians were acquainted with the use of iron some 2,500 
years before it came into general use in Europe."— Nature, July 
18, 1901, p. 282. 



Despairing Darwinism. 229 

Egypt and among the ruins of Assyria and Babylonia, 
bearing on the condition of primitive man in the 
Orient, the conclusion seems to be inevitable that 
liesiod was right, and that the modern evolution 
school is wrong, — that the history of our race is not 
one of development, but one of degeneration." 23 
Still more recently (1900) Prof. Herman V. Hil- 
precht, at Nippur, in Babylonia, and Messrs. Hogarth 
and Evans, at Kn6ssos, in Crete, have been bringing 
to the light of day relics of former civilizations, of 
which we have never dreamed. Professor Hilprecht, 
I believe, dates some of his discoveries at about 
3800 (?) B. C, or earlier. However that may be, 
he has unearthed a library of about 17,000 tablets, 
showing "a civilization equal to that of the Greeks." 
"There were banks and exchanges, loans, a settled 
knowledge of many scientific questions, and a well- 
developed commercial method. Beautiful vases have 
been excavated, which bear records of the greatness 
of the rulers; the interiors of these vases have been 
hollowed out by machinery, yet the civilization of 
to-day has boldly assumed that machinery is of com- 
paratively recent date." 

Mr. Evans does not, I believe, claim anything like 
this antiquity for his discoveries — only at least earlier 
than 1500 B. C. — but the character of what he has 
laid bare is equally remarkable. He has also recov- 
ered a lot of ancient writings, but they are unlike 
anything hitherto known, and the information they 
bear is not yet available, for no one has yet deci- 
phered them. In describing the throne-room of the 

23 Prof. J. A. Zahm's "Bible, Science, and Faith," p. 272. 



230 Modern Christianity and Modern Science. 

palace, Mr. Evans says : "The chamber . . . was 
in many ways as perfect as the room of a Pompeian 
house, though some fourteen centuries earlier in date. 
. . . But the most interesting feature remains 
to be described, The lower part of the mouldings 
of the arch on either side were, by a strange anticipa- 
tion of later Gothic, adorned with bud-like crock- 
ets. The architectural features, indeed, revealed by 
these reliefs are in almost every respect unique in an- 
cient art. 24 

We are tired of hearing certain types of palaeocos- 
mic man perpetually spoken of as the oldest, for no 
other reason than that they are the most degenerate, 
and certain types of implements or weapons called 
the most primitive solely because they were not so 
well finished as certain others in some other locality. 
When will archaeologists — or geologists, for that mat- 
ter — learn to reason correctly, and have the honesty 
of thought to keep facts clear and separate from the- 
ories, — things proved separate from things imag- 
ined? For certain it is that, at our first glimpses of 
human society, as revealed in the monuments of the 
east — and I refer now more particularly to the more 
fully-examined remains of Nineveh, Babylon, and 
Egypt — we have countless fine touches in the 
thought and life of the people, which show unmis- 
takable traces of some former state of civilization 
even higher and nobler. Their social customs, their 
languages, tell us this, and particularly their tradi- 
tions of an Edenic beginning; and their religions, 



1 Nature, May 2, 1901, p. 14. 



Despairing Darwinism. 231 

which give us embalmed in the dry husks of dead 
formalism and idolatry glimpses of lofty ideals and 
forms of prayer to one supreme God, the Creator, — 
all traces of a more intellectual, a more truly human 
state in the dim, forgotten past, the afterglow of a 
once brighter day. 

One of the most candid writers that I have read on 
the subject of evolution, Mr. S. Laing, says: — ■ 

"To enable us to talk of the 'Darwinian Law/ and 
not of the 'Darwinian Theory,' we require two dem- 
onstrations: — 

"1. That living matter really can originate from 
inorganic matter. 

"2. That new species really can be formed from 
previously-existing species." 25 

Remembering now what Huxley has told us, that 
"the man of science has learned to believe in justi- 
fication, not by faith, but by verification," and apply- 
ing it to these two problems, we know that, as for the 
first, he himself has told us that spontaneous genera- 
tion has been "defeated along the whole line," and as 
for the second, even with their millions of years and 
the geological succession ready made to draw from, 
they generally end with the endeavor to disguise their 
hopeless failure to find one real example by trying to 
confuse us with the question as to "what is a species." 

But then we know that geology refuses to allow 
them these millions of ages to draw upon, and cries 
out with stentorian voice that the general trend of 
variation since its record was made has been toward 
degeneration, not development. 

25 "Modern Science and Modern Thought," p. 54. 



232 Modem Christianity and Modern Science, 

Some day, perhaps not very far distant, this "puer- 
ile hypothesis" of Darwinism, as Mivart once called 
it, will be one more added to the countless wrecks of 
beautiful theories that lie strewn along the backward 
path of time, illustrating how easy it is to follow Her- 
bert Spencer's style of reasoning, and "reconcile" any 
reasonable quantity of facts, if we are only careful to 
reach beforehand the necessary "conviction" that this 
reconciling of the facts is only a "corollary from first 
principles." At any rate, with the process of attrition 
already going on between the mutually- destructive 
arguments of the two great opposing schools of evolu- 
tionists, and with their common platform of uniform- 
itarian geology threatening an instant collapse beneath 
their feet, those of us who have held fast our faith 
in Genesis thus far can well afford to await the devel- 
opment of events. 

The Bible is not out of date. Its story of Eden is 
no myth. The record of the Flood is neither fable nor 
allegory. They come to us of these last days with 
the sweet assurance that soon the bright, happy con- 
ditions of Edenic life will be restored to our sin- 
blasted planet, and God's redeemed people will shine 
forth in the restored image of divine beauty; when 
"there shall be no more death, neither sorrow nor 
crying, neither shall there be any more pain, for the 
former things are passed away." 

"God has given in His Word sufficient evidence 
of its divine character." The great principles of His 
moral government and His dealings with men are 
clearly presented. The only way in which men can 
get for themselves a changed character is clearly 



Despairing Darwinism. 233 

shown, and a humble search for truth will never fail 
of its reward. 

But "our faith must rest upon evidence, not dem- 
onstration. 

"All who look for hooks to hang their doubts upon 
will find them. And those who refuse to accept and 
obey God's Word until every objection has been re- 
moved, and there is no longer an opportunity for 
doubt, will never come to the light." 

"The finite minds of men are inadequate fully to 
comprehend the plans and purposes of the Infinite 
One. We can never by searching find out God. 
We must not attempt to lift with presumptuous hand 
the curtain behind which He veils His majesty. The 
apostle exclaims, 'How unsearchable are His judg- 
ments, and His ways past finding out!' We can so 
far comprehend His dealings with us, and the motives 
by which He is actuated, that we may discern bound- 
less love and mercy united to infinite power. Our 
Father in heaven orders everything in wisdom and 
righteousness, and we are not to be dissatisfied and 
distrustful, but to bow in reverent submission. He 
will reveal to us as much of His purposes as it is for 
our good to know, and beyond that we must trust 
the Hand that is omnipotent, the Heart that is full of 
love." 26 



''Great Controversy," p. 527. 



CHAPTER VIII. 

Some Moral Aspects of the Evolution Theory. 

It is rightly considered that the supreme test of any 
doctrine, religious, social, or scientific, is its bearing 
upon life and human action. "Ye shall know them 
by their fruits." What are the fruits of the evolution 
theory? We can not help replying that, reduced to 
its last logical conclusion, it lands every one in sheer 
agnosticism, — the "gospel of despair," according to 
Herbert Spencer. It was devised by infidels in the in- 
terests of infidelity; and it results in a point-blank 
denial of the loving fatherhood of God, which is the 
most fundamental idea of Christianity. The reason 
every one does not reach those barren, cheerless 
heights — beneath what they are pleased to term the 
"high and dry light of science," but which is, on the 
contrary, the blackness of darkness — is because they 
are not so logical. The evidences of God's loving 
care and tireless interest in them, as revealed in His 
works or in His Word, have in some measure got the 
better of the merciless logic of their godless theory. 

The majority readily admit that, in the light of 
their theory, the great first cause must be supremely 
indifferent to the suffering and death of animals, 
perhaps of men. For during the untold ages the 
fittest have contrived to survive, even for a time, only 
at the expense of their fellows' lives. As to the 

(234) 



Moral Aspects of the Evolution Theory. 235 

moral effects of such an idea, more hereafter. A few 
of the Christians of the present day still accept only 
that part of the theory which gives us a cooling globe 
and the geological succession of life; while, following 
the lead of Dawson and Dana, they demand a special 
creation, at least for man. They thus avoid the 
frightful heritage of bestial and savage nature which 
the evolution of man from the lower animals would 
necessarily entail. They can not altogether forego 
every memory of an Edenic beginning for our race. 
As for the vast majority of the modern school of 
"Christian" evolutionists, who constantly profess that 
they can see nothing inconsistent between Christian- 
ity and Darwinism, I can only pity their crude ideas 
of the former, and protest in the name of my Master 
against coupling His name with a doctrine so sub- 
versive of His mission to earth. 

Those who wish to orient the Bible as to the shift- 
ing, incomplete science of the day, instead of the re- 
verse, will generally meet us at the outset with the 
statement that the Bible is not intended to teach 
science. Let us see. According to Prof. E. Ray 
Lankester, the w r ell-known anatomist of Oxford, "that 
only is entitled to the name 'science' which can be 
described as knowledge of causes, or knowledge of 
the order of nature." 1 Or, in another way, we may 
by a little reasoning arrive at the same conclusion. 
As ethics or morals is the highest kind of science, in 
the broadest sense of that word, and as, from the 
Christian standpoint, all morality is founded upon the 
creature's inherent obligation to and dependence upon 



Regeneration," p. 7. 



236 Modern Christianity and Modern Science. 

his Creator, which is certainly the highest reason for 
morality that can be found, it follows that all true sci- 
ence or knowledge must be based upon knowing God 
and our relationship to Him. "The fear of the Lord 
is the beginning of wisdom." Either way, therefore, 
the Bible in its very first chapters starts out with the 
basis of all true knowledge, — a revelation of the Cre- 
ator, and of our relationship to Him as creatures. In 
fact, the only way that our poor, limited faculties can 
really be sure of anything at all is through a revelation 
from some Being possessed of absolute knowledge. 
And it is precisely around these points that the conflict 
has always raged between "science" and the Bible. It 
is over basic principles of action, which have an in- 
finitely more direct bearing upon the acts of daily life 
than has any knowledge of heat or electricity. 

But let us grant for the moment that the Scripture 
was not especially intended to teach the details of 
nature study, that is, that it has other objects in view, 
although we know that there is nothing in all the liter- 
ature of Greece and Rome that shows such an appreci- 
ation of the beauties of nature as we find in the Chris- 
tian's Bible. But we know that the latter was written 
in various human forms of speech, not in any heavenly 
tongue. It was written by men in their native lan- 
guages, and by men that were perhaps not perfect 
masters of these languages. Each writer shows as 
distinct an individual style as Macaulay, Addison, or 
Carlyle. But they knew nothing of electricity or of 
gravity as such. Some of them may have been en- 
tirely ignorant of the globular form of the earth and 
of the heliocentric motion of our universe; though 



Moral Aspects of the Evolution Theory. 237 

it is a very suggestive fact that when we get back to 
the time of Job, 2 which is doubtless the earliest post- 
diluvian word-picture that we have in the whole Bible, 
we have a marvelous knowledge of nature that suc- 
ceeding ages largely forgot. Job at least knew of the 
earth being "hung upon nothing," 3 and was sufficiently 
skilful in his use of his charming figure of the "clay" 
and the "seal" to state precisely that each separate part 
of "it [the earth] is turned [to the sun] as clay to the 
seal" (not the reverse), and thus receives that daily 
impress of energy that makes its mantle of verdure 
stand forth as a beautiful garment." 4 I do not wish to 
imply that any writer in the Bible lays down any dog- 
matic statement about the earth being flat, or indeed 
any statement of a similar nature. But they all talk 
of phenomena as they appear to us. They speak of 
the sun "rising," of mountains "burning," and of the 
stars being infinitely inferior to the sun. But we of 
the twentieth century have not discarded such lan- 
guage, because it expresses the truth of the phenom- 



2 For recent testimony to the extreme antiquity of Job, confirm- 
ing Doctor Hale's verdict that he lived some time before Abraham, 
and identifying him with the Jobab of Gen. 10:29, wno was ^ e 
grandson of Eber, see "The Earth and the World, How 
Formed?" chapter 9, by A. G. Jennings; Flemming H. Revell 
Co., 1900. 

3 Job 26:7. 

4 Job 38:14. 

For a more complete exposition of these and other texts, 
where the Old Testament writers clearly anticipated the discover- 
ies of modern science in physics and astronomy, see the work 
(quoted elsewhere) by Dr. L. A. Reed, "The Scriptural Founda- 
tion of Science," 1901. 



238 Modern Christianity and Modem Science. 

ena in question from our standpoint. We might as 
well refuse to talk any longer about " seeing" things, 
because we do not really see them, but only see the 
pictures of them that are momentarily painted on 
the back of our eye-chambers by the magic pencil 
of the sun. 5 In the same way the Creator, when ad- 
dressing man, is not ashamed to speak of His uni- 
verse, or even of His own attributes and actions, in 
terms of human thought. Nor does He stop part 
way and give us His revelation in the language of 
the philosophers; "He never shuts Himself up to the 
learned and the wise." He addresses "the man in the 
street;" He takes man just where He finds him, un- 
der the dominion of sin, and points him away to the 
eternal realities of the universe from His point of 
view. 

But, looking at it again from another position, the 
Scripture, though not concerned about "scientific" 
precision, must at least be as accurate as any science. 
No imperfection of human language may for a mo- 
ment be permitted to cast a reflection upon the per- 
fect truth of every statement. If a "revelation" in 
any genuine sense, it must reveal only truth from 
God's standpoint, or from that of the universe at 
large. It must be infinitely more than the gropings 
of wise and good men after the Creator. The Scrip- 
ture everywhere claims for itself far more than this. 
It is in reality as much an incarnation as that which 
the world saw some nineteen centuries ago. Christ 



5 "A concession to the exigencies of language is not a departure 
from the exactness of science."— Professor Perry, Political Econ- 
omy, p. 121. 



Moral Aspects of the Evolution Theory. 239 

took upon Himself our nature, all stained and scarred 
by the curse. He was made "in the likeness of sin- 
ful flesh" that He might "condemn sin in the flesh." 6 
In this light the work of the "Higher Criticism," with 
all other modern quibbles about how much of the Bi- 
ble is inspired, is but the nineteenth or twentieth cen- 
tury revival of the Eutychean controversy. Back 
there they spent months and years in discussing the 
vain question of how much of Christ was human and 
how much divine. And let us remember in passing 
that, as the result of that discussion, the pope was 
made the author of the faith. What will this mod- 
ern controversy result in? Surely we have much 
more promising fields for research than the mystery 
of the incarnation. It will be the lesson of eternity 
to comprehend some of its first principles. The 
divine is there; the human is there, both in the writ- 
ten Word and in the crucified. Each partook of 
human limitations, human infirmity. But Christ did 
no sin; and God's written Word does not blunder. 

However, it is not the conscientious believer in 
the Bible as a whole, — the modern Christian, — who 
is likely to be found making apologies for the first 
chapters of Genesis. He knows too well the awful 
accuracy of Moses' prediction of the fate of the He- 
brew nation, in Deuteronomy 28, to doubt the in- 
spiration by which he spoke. The believer in the last 
chapters of Revelation, which describe this world 
renovated and restored to its Edenic beauty, where 
"there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor 
crying, neither shall there be any more pain/' can 

6 Rom. 8:3. 



240 Modem Christianity and Modern Science. 

very well believe that this is but our restoration to a 
long-lost heritage. It is the one who is unwilling 
to take other parts of the Bible literally, and who 
refuses to share in the hope of our Lord's return, who 
must of necessity deny any direct creation of our 
world, and refuse to believe in anything "supernat- 
ural," or beyond what he knows of the laws of nature. 
The world outside of the Roman Catholic Church 
is fast being more distinctly divided into two classes, 
those who accept God's Word just as it reads, daily 
allowing it to become incarnate in their lives, and 
those who explain away as "errant" and "uninspired" 
all that does not suit their own narrow, human, sin- 
ful ideas. 

But the controversy concerning man's origin has 
too long hung around the first chapters of Genesis, 
even though in them is the first picture that we get 
of God's work of creation. Many "theistic evolu- 
tionists" have tried to make it appear that this is 
about the only part of the Bible that is directly op- 
posed to their theory. But if all the writings of 
Moses were obliterated from our knowledge, the 
situation would not be altered a particle. The key- 
note of the Scriptures is that man has sinned, that 
all are now sinners, and that nothing but divine power 
can bring us back into fellowship with God and into 
harmony with His law of love. Character is the re- 
sult of individual choice of good or evil, — God or 
self, — and character decides destiny. Those who 
have allowed their minds and characters to become 
fixed in ruts that are inconsistent with the happiness 
of the universe will not be chained to the side of the 



Moral Aspects of the Evolution Theory. 241 

infinite One. Their fate is fixed by their own choice, 
and will be carried out for the good of the universe. 
The present conditions of pain, misery, and death are 
not eternal, either past or future. Sin can not always 
exist in the universe of a holy and just God. It is 
but an incident, a lesson, in the long story of eternal 
love. Sin and sinners must finally cease to be. 
Those who do not allow sin to be cleaned out of them 
now, will themselves be included in its destruction 
when God undertakes to clean up His universe. But 
just at present man is not in harmony with his Maker. 
Take this general thought out of the Scriptures, and 
what is there left? 

Now, that the present state of our world, and of 
human nature especially, is not ideally perfect, but 
is most wretchedly imperfect, abnormal, or depraved, 
through some cause or causes, no one will, I think, 
deny. 

"All my knowledge is that joy is gone, 
And this thing woe crept in among our hearts, 
There to remain." 

The wisest of the ancients, like their modern chil- 
dren, lamented, but could not cure, the ingrained, 
misery-producing evils of the human heart. 

And I can see but three possible explanations of 
this fact: — 

First, assuming, of course, that our material uni- 
verse, ourselves included, had an intelligent De- 
signer, as it everywhere testifies, man may have been 
created out of hand in his present condition of misery 
and evil, fierce lusts, murderous hatreds, and innate 
selfishness making miserable both himself and all 
16 



242 Modem Christianity and Modern Science. 

about him. That is, man was created out of joint 
with nature and nature's God. But such a notion is 
too preposterous to be entertained for a moment; 
for it charges with purposeless folly an evidently wise 
Creator, making Him the responsible cause of all our 
world's misery and sin. Let us forget that such an 
idea was ever mentioned. 

Second, man may have been formed in an imper- 
fectly-developed condition physically, mentally, and 
morally, and may now be on the road to a higher 
development or ultimate perfection, the evils and 
innate selfishness of human nature being but the sur- 
vival of a past, where such a character and nature were 
a natural endowment, the outworking of principles im- 
planted in nature long ages before man's existence. 
And then, "what we call evil is not a unique phenom- 
ena confined to man," and is not in any way whatever 
connected with man's free will as an intelligent being 
rebelling against his Creator. It "must be a great 
fact pervading all nature, and a part of its very con- 
stitution." Such is indeed the teachings of "theistic 
evolution," as advocated by Le Conte and others. 7 



1 See "Evolution and Religious Thought," by Prof. J. Le Conte, 

P. 365. 

With this compare the teaching of Celsus, the first ancient 
writer who undertook to attack Christianity in an express work, 
and who, according to Neander, "was not improbably a Neo- 
Platonist." 

"For in this world evil is a necessary thing. It has no origin, 
and will have no end. . . . The ofy i s the source from which 
what we call evil is ever springing up afresh." — Neander's 
General History of the Christian Religion and Church, vol. I, 



Moral Aspects of the Evolution Theory. 243 

But surely this idea is not one whit better than the 
former, for it makes sin and evil the endowment of 
the Creator, something that He saddled upon the 
universe when He started it evolving. Why should 
He do this? Was He just experimenting, or was 
He conditioned by the material on which He was 
working? But this whole conception is so contrary 
to the notion of the Creator as a God of love that 
it also ought surely to be forgotten. The agnostics 
are less dishonoring to His name, for they refuse to 
believe that an intelligent Designer would make 
Himself responsible for such a state of things. They 
urge that it would be nothing but a tyrant or a fiend 
that could implant such evil tendencies in a creature, 
and then punish it, even by the law of cause and effect, 
for living out the dictates of its hereditary nature. 

From such God-dishonoring schemes we turn with 
relief to the third possible account of man's origin, 
which is that "God made man upright," 8 "in His 
own image/' 9 and pronounced him "very good;" but 
that man, by a free act of choice, choosing to dis- 
obey one of the lightest possible restrictions, fell 
from his high estate, and in his heart selfishness took 
the place of love, by the mysterious inherent nature 



pp. 233, 234. Translated by Joseph Torrey\ Henry G. Bohn, 1850. 

I have just seen the announcement of Professor Le Conte's death. 
I am sorry to have to appear in the light of casting reflections on 
the memory of the departed, though my conflict is not with the 
man but with his teaching. He has in this volume given us many 
grand and lofty ideas, though I can not help saying that the 
teaching of the last chapter, from which the above is taken, is not 
Christianity, but paganism, pure and unmixed. 

8 Eccl. 7:29. 

9 Gen. 1:27. 



244 Modern Christianity and Modern Science. 

of disobedience. That in this he also unsettled the 
equilibrium and nice balance existing between him- 
self and the surrounding nature of this world, and 
thus, as a sympathetic or reflex result of his acts, 
dragged down with him in his fall all that nature over 
which he had been placed as king; that the history 
of our world has been one unceasing record of de- 
generacy and decay, save that a few, in all ages and 
in all climes, by the still more mysterious virtue of 
the atonement, have been rescued from this condi- 
tion and its consequences, and educated and devel- 
oped so far past the condition of our first parent that, 
spite of heredity, they can stand where he fell, and 
are thus proved fit to become subjects of God's ever- 
lasting kingdom; that during all the ages the Creator 
has been trying all that almighty power could do and 
infinite love devise, consistent with the creature's 
sacred freedom of choice, to bring every human be- 
ing into this state of ultimated perfection of charac- 
ter, as a prerequisite to the gift of endless life, a gift 
utterly unsafe in the hands of rebels. "But ye will 
not come unto Me that ye might have life. ,, 

This is the only explanation that can make our 
"present evil world" the work of a God of love. And 
it throws the responsibility of evil on what Romanes 
calls the only real generating cause of which we 
have direct experimental knowledge, viz., man's free 
will. Man's power of free moral choice is an obvi- 
ous fact, in spite of all the fatalistic quibbles that 
philosophy has ever devised. And the freedom of the 
creature's will is the only thing that can relieve God 
from being directly responsible for everything found 



Moral Aspects of the Evolution Theory. 245 

in His universe. And even then the ultimate results, 
after sin is but a memory of the past, must be suffi- 
cient to warrant the frightful risk involved in creat- 
ing beings free to choose right or wrong, good or 
ill, loving allegiance to the Creator or rebellion 
against Him. God did not destroy rebellion in the 
bud, for then He might have been called a tyrant, 
and subsequent ages would have served through fear, 
not love. He has allowed the bud to develop and 
bear its fruit, and the universe is now pretty well con- 
vinced that with the existence of God's law is bound 
up the well-being of all His creatures. The infidel 
denies that one act of disobedience is sufficient to 
account for all our world's misery and woe by natural 
process ; but this is only the old lie of unbelief uttered 
first in the garden of Eden. 

But let us go back over some of the principles in- 
volved. It is not necessary to assume that our ma- 
terial universe had an intelligent Designer. Nature 
with her thousand voices testifies of an all-pervading 
Mind. We must all stand with uncovered heads be- 
fore the majesty of this self-evident fact. The general 
results of modern science are certainly tending more 
and more to demonstrate that matter does not have 
in itself the marvelous powers of life and motion 
which we see about us. Reasoning men have prac- 
tically given up the attempt to think of nature with- 
out a God. In the words of the father of McGill 
University: — 

"I know nothing about the origin of man except 
what I am told in the Scripture, — that God created 
him. I do not know anything more than that, and 



246 Modem Christianity and Modern Science. 

I do not know anybody who does. I would say 
with Lord Kelvin, there is nothing in science that 
reaches the origin of anything at all." 

So that the modern discussion is not now of the 
existence of a Great First Cause, but solely about 
His character. Now the principles which the Maker 
has put into His work must be an expression of His 
character, nay, must be His character, as far as the 
latter can be displayed by the results of work done. 
To illustrate : If we step into a home and see a moose 
head in the vestibule or hallway, a deer's head on the 
wall of the dining-room, and a tiger skin stretched 
before the grate, we could not well go astray if we 
rated the proprietor as an enthusiastic sportsman. 
Or if, in passing a farmhouse, we see, amid the diffi- 
culties of a new country, the barns and outbuildings 
in good condition, the stock and machinery properly 
housed, and the fields and fences in good order, we 
naturally conclude that the owner is industrious and 
careful. Just so with the universe. The "tooth- 
and-claw" phase of nature, and especially the de- 
praved, evil condition of human nature, — "here where 
men sit and hear each other groan," — must in some 
way express the character of our Designer, unless 
some free, conscious intelligence (such as man him- 
self) has marred His work and perverted the natural 
endowment of His creatures. If retaliation for in- 
juries received, if pride and lust, are perfectly natural 
to the human heart, as we must all sadly confess they 
are, they must express in some recondite manner the 
character of our Creator, if He made us as ive are, or 
on any lower or more undeveloped plane of being 



Moral Aspects of the Evolution Theory. 247 

out of which these characters have sprung; and there- 
fore these things can not be really evil; they can not 
be immoral. How can it be otherwise? Let us be 
plain. Moral duties are such as inhere in the rela- 
tionship between the creature and his Creator. No 
other basis for morality can be found. Hence, if our 
Creator has endowed any of us with certain instincts 
and propensities, our moral duty to Him obliges us 
not to repress and subdue, but to exercise and develop 
these instincts and propensities to their utmost pos- 
sible extent. It would be immoral to do otherwise — 
"sinful," if you please. Hence, I repeat, the hatred, 
lust, and pride so natural to the human heart are in 
no sense wrong or punishable if they represent a 
natural endowment given us by our Creator, no mat- 
ter through what process He formed us. 

But every one knows that these instincts and pas- 
sions bring misery and ruin alike to the subjects and 
objects of their force. Misery and woe are the inev- 
itable results of their exercise. Hence we can go 
further and say that a being who would thus punish 
his creatures, even by the law of cause and effect, for 
doing as he taught them or endowed them, would 
be all that we understand by the word "fiend." But 
such is the god of the evolutionist. Need I suggest 
that there must be something wrong with a notion 
of man's origin that leads us to such a frightful con- 
clusion? Is not the moral issue, as set forth above, a 
surer way of gauging the truth or falsity of the evolu- 
tion theory than the long, devious methods con- 
nected with variation and the other biological prob- 
lems, even supposing the theory apparently capable 



248 Modern Christianity and Modern Science. 

of the most rigorous proof, which, of course, it is not, 
even Huxley to the end of his life acknowledging 
that it is not ? 10 Need we offer any apology for meas- 
uring this scientific hypothesis by other and far more 
certain standards of truth? In short, need we hesi- 
tate a moment to confess that we have an unconquer- 
able aversion for a doctrine so blasphemous, so dis- 
honoring, to the sovereign Lord of all? 

In contrast with such a theor) r let us read some 
Scripture texts. Our Lord affirmed that He came 
"to seek and to save that which was lost," 11 not 
merely those who were lost, "that which was lost," — 
the world and all it contains. This language would 
be meaningless if man has been continually progress- 
ing from a crude beginning. In that case nothing 
ever was lost; all that our race has known is gain. 
And surely the principles of progression, which we 
are told are strictly according to "natural law," would 
insure the ultimate perfection of the race without the 
intervention of a divine Mediator and the death of 
a divine Sacrifice. Can we not therefore say that 
the evolution theory converts into a fable the old, old 
story of the cross, and makes the whole Scripture a 
jargon of unmeaning folly? 

Let us also note Paul's words on this subject. And 
I may say here that the words of Paul are as good au- 
thority on this or any other subject as those of Moses, 
cr of Christ Himself. To those who admit only that 
part of the Bible which suits their fancy, I would quote 
the words of Christ to the Pharisees, with all they 



10 See Nature, June 13, 1901, p. 147. 

11 Luke 19:10. 



Moral Aspects of the Evolution Theory. 249 

imply: "Had ye believed Moses, ye would have be- 
lieved Me, for he wrote of Me. But if ye believe not 
his writings, how shall ye believe My words?" The 
Scriptures must stand or fall together. Paul, there- 
fore, was not a pettifogging Jewish lawyer, or any- 
thing of the kind. He taught the Christianity of 
Christ, and if his words are nonsense, the whole sys- 
tem of revealed religion tumbles with them. But he 
distinctly says, "By. one man sin entered into the 
world, and death by sin; and so death passed upon 
all men, for that all have sinned." 12 If these words 
have any meaning, they tell us that there was not a 
note of discord in the harmony of our world prior to 
the disobedience of our first parent. They tell us 
that there was no death — hence no suffering of any 
kind: the less is included in the greater — in our race 
till decreed upon us for that first transgression. 
Death, with its implied misery and moral and mental 
degeneration, are not our inheritance through in- 
complete workmanship on the part of the Creator; 
but Paul's Christianity plainly says that they come 
to us through heredity, by reason of Adam volun- 
tarily putting himself out of harmony with his Cre- 
ator's plan. 

In the first chapter also of this same epistle he tells 
us that the degraded condition of what scientists call 
"primitive" peoples is not the result of their begin- 
ning on a low moral plane, with an inherited bias 
toward physical and moral evil, but resulted from 
their choosing not to retain the knowledge of God in 



12 Rom. 5:12-19. 



250 Modern Christianity and Modern Science. 

their hearts, till God gave them up to their own lusts, 
to eat the fruits of their own doings. 13 

But Peter puts the climax on this argument when 
he holds out, as the hope of the church, "the times of 
the restitution of all things, which God hath spoken 
by the mouth of all His holy prophets since the world 
began." 14 The word rendered "restitution," 9 anoxdra- 
(jraffis is defined by Liddell and Scott as "a complete 
restoration, reestablishment." This is evidently a re- 
turn to primeval conditions. According to the evo- 
lution theory, "restitution" would be about the worst 
thing that could possibly happen to poor humanity. 
It would mean the surrender of all the "progress" of 
these thousands of years, and our return to the prim- 
itive bestial conditions. But Peter says it is more 
or less the theme of all the holy prophets since the 
world began, as the hope of the church. 

No wonder the host of books now being issued 
by the theistic evolutionists stoutly insist that, since 
evolution is true (?), we must have a complete "re- 
construction of Christian theology." 15 But when 
"reconstructed," as they suggest, the question is, 
Ought it still to retain the old name of Christianity? 
.Did they not try some such "reconstruction" of 
Christianity in the third century and onward (Neo 
platonism 16 ) ; and was not that one of the prime fac- 



13 Rom. 1:21-28. 

14 Acts 3:21. 

15 Le Conte, "Evolution and Religious Thought," p. 295. 

16 That a comparison between Plato's theory of the origin of 
animals, as propounded in his "Timaeus," and Darwin's scheme 
of variation and natural selection, is no mere fancy, the reader 



Moral Aspects of the Evolution Theory. 251 

tors whose product is known to history as the Roman 
Catholic Church? O my brothers, how can you 
have the heart to recommend such an experiment 
for retrial? 

'Tor God so loved the world, that He gave His 
only-begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him 
should not perish, but have everlasting life." The 
amazing sacrifice required to effect a remedy for the 
horrible condition called sin is an everlasting protest 



should consult that valuable work already referred to, * 'Creation 
or Evolution?" chapter 2, by George Ticknor Curtis; D. 
Appleton & Co. In this it is shown that the one is simply 
"the reversed complement of the other," p. 73. Plato started 
organic creation with human beings, who, neglecting to maintain 
their high duties and aims, go on in ""successive debasements, 
which result in the formation of lower and still lower animals, 
until we reach the shell-fish fixed upon the earth at the bottom of 
the waten . . . The different species of animals, after man, 
were not special creations by an infinite power interfering in each 
case oy a separate exercise of creative will. They were a growth 
of an inferior organization out jfa superior through the invariable 
operation of tendencies which changed the forms of the animals. 
. . . It may thus be said with entire truth that the Platonic idea 
of the origin of the different races of animals presents a parallel to 
the Darwinian theory, in which it will be found that the one is the 
reverse of the other, both of them proceeding upon and involving 
analogous principles of evolution, operating in the one system 
from below upward, and in the other from a higher point down- 
ward." Pp. 59, 60, Italics supplied. There is little doubt that 
with slight modifications and an elaboration in conformity with 
modern scientific discoveries, the scheme of Plato might, even 
now, be made about as probable a theory as that of Darwinism, 
the real fundamental difference consisting in this one point, that 
Darwin's ape-men were successful in attaining their ideals, while 
Plato's poor fellows were not, though in this respect "the divine" 
Greek seems to have got the nearer to the great heart of nature. 



252 Modern Christianity and Modern Science. 

against the idea that man could be developed or edu- 
cated out of it in any other way. Like oil and water, 
the two systems will never mix. The evolution the- 
ory is the modern scientific way of a man being his 
own saviour; the Christian religion points us to the 
"Lamb of God that taketh away the sin of the world." 
It would surely seem that no further indictment of 
evolution were necessary to induce every one really 
desiring truth at any cost to dismiss such an anti- 
Christian theory from his thoughts forevermore. 
But we shall in our remaining chapter examine its 
nature a little further. Some who are slow to see 
the issues in the field of ideal religion will readily dis- 
cern its bearing on the problems of every-day life. 
Accordingly we shall now show that it is utterly sub- 
versive of civil and religious liberty for the individual; 
in fact, that the only gospel it knows for the evils of 
our world is a religio-political despotism, a scheme 
that, as already hinted, surely needs no retrial. 



CHAPTER IX. 

Evolution and the World Problems. 

The children of the present have fallen heirs to the 
labor of the past. The intellectual accumulations 
of the ages have descended to us, and lie before us 
tabulated and indexed for our convenience. A 
knowledge of our cosmos in some of its broadest 
generalities and in some of its most minute particu- 
lars has taught us how to lay our hands upon the sea, 
the fire, and the air, and bid them come and go at 
our convenience, relieving our distress, performing 
our wearying labor, and shortening time and space 
at our behest. 

But all are not deceived by the tinsel and gloss of 
our modern civilization. The theistic evolutionists 
may not be able to see the artificial character of our 
modern life, or the course in which our world is hur- 
rying on, but then we have already shown them to 
be about the most illogical people in the world. The 
agnostic and worldling can see the breakers ahead, 
even if the popular churches can not; but they see 
no relief save through a baptism of war, blood, and 
despotism, such as the world has periodically under- 
gone. 

Most clear thinkers know that this is not an age 
of preeminent mental or moral development. They 
know that knowledge is not power in the realm of 

(253) 



254 Modem Christianity and Modem Science. 

morals. The creature comforts of a high civilization 
have never in the history of our world tended to 
strengthen the foundations of man's moral nature. 
We can not inherit the progress that our fathers made 
in heart culture any more than we can in art, and all 
acknowledge that in the latter we are sadly degen- 
erate. He who reads the thoughts says the same of 
our morals. "In the last days perilous times shall 
come;" and the record enumerates nineteen sins that 
we see to-day abounding on every hand. "Evil men 
and seducers" are certainly waxing "worse and 
worse." 

In the words of Froude : "We live in days of prog- 
ress and enlightenment; nature on a hundred sides 
has unlocked her storehouses of knowledge. But she 
has furnished no 'open sesame' to bid the mountain 
gate fly wide which leads to conquest of self." 1 In 
morals and ethics, as in art, our laws and models are 
all in the dim, misty past; and the dark ages of sin 
and woe, that separate us from those bright ideals, 
have served only to weaken our moral powers of dis- 
cernment and resolve, and to bind about our degen- 
erate frames our heritage of mental, moral, and phys- 
ical decay. 

But some may ask how we are to account for the 
wonderful progress and increase of knowledge in 
these days. I would remind them that increased 
knowledge does not by any means imply increased 
mental or moral ability. Advance in culture only 
means that the latent capacities of man's nature have 
been called into action by education and exercise, 



1 Essay on "Bunyan," p. 34. 



Evolution and the World Problems. 255 

not that they have been acquired by evolution. As 
an eminent English author remarks: "Function can 
not precede mechanism. . . . The telegraph 
cable had to be submerged in the Atlantic before 
messages could be flashed between London and New 
York." 2 Education and opportunity can not create 
faculty, only nurse it into development. The reader 
will remember that this is the argument of Alfred 
Russell Wallace that man has not been produced 
from lower animals by evolution, because he has in his 
hand and larynx, as well as in his brain, latent capaci- 
ties and faculties that are utterly useless to the sav- 
age in his barbarous state, and by him absolutely 
unused. I may also add that they seem to me 
equally incontestible proofs that the savage can not 
be a primitive type, but must surely be a degenerate 
condition. "It has not been by any fundamentally- 
improved development of his corporeal frame or 
mental capacity in the course of generations that man 
has advanced to his present stage of civilization and 
knowledge, but by the preservation, communication, 
and transmission of experience, acquired in all the 
various ways of life in successive generations. This 
power to preserve, communicate, and transmit the 
knowledge acquired by experience is a grand and 
characteristic attribute of man, the wisdom and ex- 
perience of the individual being thus not lost to so- 
ciety by his death." 3 



2 "The Evolution of the Human Race from Apes, a Doctrine 
Unsanctioned by Science," p. 29, by Thomas Wharton Jones, 
F. R. S.,F. R. C. S., etc. 

3 T- W. Jones, "The Evolution of the Human Race from Apes," 
etc., p. 31- 



256 Modem Christianity and Modem Science. 

Or, from the standpoint of the Bible: The angel 
told Daniel that, in the "time of the end," many 
would be hurrying hither and thither over the earth, 
and that "knowledge" would be "increased." 4 But 
Paul also no less clearly pictures the "perilous times" 
of the same "last days," because of selfishness and sin, 
and says that, instead of the world growing better and 
happier, "evil men and seducers shall wax worse and 
worse, deceiving and being deceived." 5 

The Bible clearly explains this that is such a puzzle, 
such a seeming contradiction to many, and, besides 
giving a better explanation of present-day conditions 
than evolution ever hinted at, it gives a detailed de- 
scription of the glorious outcome of it all. 

The present wonderful increase of knowledge and 
mechanical power in the hands of man is not the re- 
sult of inherent racial progress, but of divine inter- 
position for a special purpose. Had it been the 
result of evolution, it ought to have come somewhat 
gradually, and not be all crowded into the last hun- 
dred years, — the last sixtieth part or less of human 
history. No, there is a reason for it all. The church 
for long centuries had neglected to heed the com- 
mand to "go into all the world and preach the gospel 
to every creature." like her Jewish sister, she had 
shut herself up in proud seclusiveness, deeming the 
rest of the world too degraded to heed the gospel 
call. But Christ had said that the gospel of His 
coming kingdom must before the end be "preached 
in all the world for a witness unto all nations." And 

4 Dan. 12:4. 

5 2 Tim. 3:1-3. 



Evolution and the World Problems. 25; 

so, in the very evening of time, while the shadows 
of the gathering night were settling down over the 
church's unfinished work, He taught men how to 
employ the elements of nature, and even the very 
bolts of His throne, in speeding the work His people 
had so long neglected. 

We may regard this as one of the chief explana- 
tions of present-day conditions. We have already 
in the first chapters of this noted some other impor- 
tant results, such as the demonstration of the doc- 
trine of Divine Immanence and of the all-pervading, 
unchangeable character of God's law, moral and 
natural. The first of these serves to accentuate the 
ingratitude of not loving and trusting our Creator, 
who attends us down into our lowest depths of vice 
and folly, supplying physical power directly even to 
the very tongue that curses Him, until His tireless 
love breaks out with the reproach that "thou hast 
made Me to serve with thy sins; thou hast wearied 
Me with thine iniquities." 6 And the eternal char- 
acter of God's all-embracing law in nature has evi- 
dently been brought to the notice of this generation 
to show us that His moral law, the rule of His moral 
government, is equally eternal in its character; that 
it is embodied in the very nature of His universe, and 
can be transgressed and set aside only at the cost of 
misery and death. The great controversy of the 
ages between good and evil has always been over 
the character of God's law, whether it was designed 
in love or not, and over the inherent nature of re- 
bellion, whether it results in happiness and liberty, 

6 Isaiah 43:24, 
17 



258 Modern Christianity and Modern Science. 

or the reverse. Modern science has only tended to 
place us more on a par with the intelligences of other 
worlds in estimating this great problem. The Sab- 
bath question, involving as it does the whole charac- 
ter of the divine law, is certainly one of the great 
problems of the day. The Lord evidently means for 
us to judge of His moral law by our increased knowl- 
edge of what we generally distinguish as "natural" 
law, though with a little clearer thought we would 
see His mental, moral, and physical laws all correlated 
together. 

But the logical, reflecting scientist is the very man 
who stands most in awe of the outcome of present 
conditions along the lines of their natural develop- 
ment. Any one with an intelligent knowledge of the 
history of nations can not fail to look with terrible 
forebodings at the prospect before society and the 
world. So much so that the real statesmen are al- 
most solely occupied with desperate endeavors to 
stem the universal tendency toward retrograde move- 
ments as the next thing in order. Most thinking 
men acknowledge that we seem as far away as ever 
from the long-talked-of, long-hoped-for age of uni- 
versal peace and brotherly love. 

A writer in the "Forum," December, 1896, says: — 

"The diffusion of intelligence is now understood to 
be of little conservative value, if not accompanied by 
a corresponding improvement in morals." 

In other words, you may educate the memory and 
the reason, but if the secret motives of the heart are 
not purified, you have only a more cultured, amiable 
rascaL 



Evolution and the World Problems. 259 

As to the moral outlook, note the following words 
of President Harper, of Chicago University, as 
quoted in some of the recent periodicals: — 

"We are training the mind in our public schools, 
but the moral side of the child's nature is almost 
neglected. The Roman Catholic Church insists on 
remedying the manifest evil, but our Protestant 
churches seem to ignore it completely. They expect 
our Sunday-schools to make good what our public 
schools leave undone, and the consequence is we 
overlook a danger as real and as great as any we have 
had to face." 

Then, again, Goldwin Smith, in the number of the 
"Forum" referred to above, says that our modern 
system of education "begets a general desire to rise in 
life." And this desire "to rise" must inevitably 
breed almost universal discontent, as we see is the 
case all about us; for very few, even by industry, tem- 
perance, and perseverance, traits not especially char- 
acteristic of our day, can manage to "rise" as fast as 
they think they ought. Organized greed and social 
position have the upper hand, and evidently mean 
to keep it. And the almost universally-accepted 
doctrine that all progress, whether in the individual 
or the race, is to be reached only by a process of 
the survival of the fittest, is intensifying, as never 
before, the innate selfishness of human nature, and 
embittering in every pursuit of life the sad struggle 
for existence. Perhaps no other one cause and re- 
sult serve more to differentiate the present age from 
all that has gone before. The hitherto undreamed 
of blessings and comforts of the present day, instead 



260 Modem Christianity and Modern Science. 

of tending toward universal peace and happiness, 
have only emphasized the fact that the greater the 
blessings received, the greater will be the discontent 
and depravity of unregenerate hearts. Intelligent 
men of to-day, whether evolutionists or not, stand in 
dread of a retrograde movement, that will again land 
our world in the throes of social wreck and possible 
anarchy, all the more hopeless and horrible this time 
because it will be universal over the world, cotermi- 
nous with the bounds of civilization. 7 

Thus far all are agreed. It is when we come to 
discuss possible ways of dealing with these problems, 
and of trying to prevent these natural tendencies of 
our age, that the logic of the evolution philosophy 
begins to show itself. The increase of frightful and 
incurable diseases, as idiocy, cancer, and consump- 
tion, may evoke the taunt of the heartless philosopher 
that Christianity, by preserving the moral and phys- 
ical wrecks of humanity, and allowing them to re- 
produce their like, is retarding the "progress" of the 
race. He may even suggest, as some physicians do 
now and then, that it would be much better to return 



7 Just as these pages are going to the press we have given in the 
current dispatches to the daily papers a letter from Mr. Herbert 
Spencer in which he bewails the present tendency toward milita- 
rism and the "coercive regime," or despotism; though he seems 
not to realize that, in glorifying the struggle for survival at the 
expense of others as the normal and not an abnormal condition of 
society and creation in general, no other one writer in the English 
language has perhaps contributed as much as himself to bring 
about the very condition he deplores. In conclusion he says, 
" My fear is that the retrogade movement will become too strong 
to be checked by argument or exhortation. ' ' 



Evolution and the World Problems. 261 

to the heroic days of Sparta or Plato's ideal republic, 
when all the malformed and sickly were quietly got 
rid of by exposure. According to their theory, it was 
by some such application of the doctrine of the sur- 
vival of the fittest that we have reached our present 
attainments. A return to such customs is, of course, 
logical enough, but perhaps "inopportune," and not 
likely to be a live issue very soon. 

On the other hand, the increase of crime and law- 
lessness of every kind, the increased lack of self- 
government on the part of the individual everywhere 
so apparent, has given us two methods of dealing with 
these conditions, which are not so harmless, because 
not so manifestly extravagant. On the contrary, 
they are eminently logical and "necessary," and from 
the evolution standpoint very likely to bring us 
relief. They are the greatest living issues before 
the social and political worlds to-day. These two 
kindred specifics for all the evils of our time, we may 
briefly say, are a "benevolent" but sturdy despotism 
and the regulation of religion and morals by law. 
Twin fiends, born in iniquity and cradled in apostasy 
from God, they are to-day piecing together into life 
the dismembered forms that man fondly believed he 
had cut to pieces forevermore. Even now are they 
leering their bloodshot eyes upon the remnant 
church as she hurries for the last time into the wil- 
derness, away from that hatred which history declares 
is so deeply ingrained in the sinful heart that it can 
be eradicated only by the utter destruction of sin and 
sinners. These are the living issues before the world. 
Is democracy a failure? Is the principle of govern- 



262 Modern Christianity and Modern Science. 

ment by consent false or true? But, above all, does 
the state need the assistance of the church, or vice 
versa? Shall we gain or lose by uniting religion and 
politics? Reader, these are the questions we must 
erelong think about and individually and collectively 
decide. The direst conflict of all the ages is begin- 
ning to boom about our ears. On which side will we 
be found? 

It is true that these methods of dealing with pres- 
ent-day problems are not yet being advocated by the 
same parties. The selfish worldling, the practical 
politician, is, of course, the advocate of the first. He 
can not but see that it is the outworking of knowl- 
edge and individual liberty on the part of the turbu- 
lent classes that is bringing about the social evils he 
deplores. Knowledge and liberty are not in them- 
selves regenerative; they are only forms of power 
placed within the reach of the individual, enabling 
him to better disguise for a time, or to carry out on 
a broader scale, his real governing motives of char- 
acter. And we all know that an increase of power 
ill the hands of sinners only brings an increase 
of blasphemy, rebellion, and woe. But the only 
remedy that the politician can think of is to regulate 
and restrain the causes; in other words, to regulate 
free speech and individual action. History testifies 
that, whenever people have ceased to be capable of 
governing themselves, there has always been found 
waiting a man or a set of men anxious to assume the 
job. By our taking up the "white man's burden" 
of governing what we are pleased to call half-civilized 
peoples beyond the seas, we shall end by finding a 
similar state of things requiring attention at home. 



Evolution and the World Problems. 263 

As a recent writer very ominously expressed it, 
"The populace have had their day, and have proved 
to be ignorant, criminal, and corruptible." 

Everybody knows that there is everywhere a strong 
current setting in against the old-time principles of 
government by consent of the governed. When 
world-known scholars like Dr. Lyman Abbott under- 
take to guide this reaction, we can neither deny nor 
ignore the trend of the popular mind. What the 
scholars advocate to-day, the people will believe and 
act upon to-morrow. What with the labor unions, 
and what with the trusts, we are certainly beholding 
the fast passing of individualism. And this is not 
in America only, but in the Old World. The few 
great nations that have their capitals there are fast 
parceling up the world between them, and the popu- 
lar mind in every one of them is tending steadily 
away from the rights of the individual, and toward 
the aggrandizement of the state, making everything 
subordinate to the one idea of corporate "progress." 
Some are going even further than this, for a recent 
writer in one of the best-known English weeklies re- 
marks, "As care for the tribe preceded care for the 
nation, so care for the nation may only precede care for 
a federation of the nations." When the latter is an 
assured fact, may heaven pity not only the smaller 
states, but the poor individual atom in every one of 
these great, soul-crushing machines. How can men 

WHO HAVE READ EVEN THE OUTLINES OF HISTORY 
LOOK ON WITH COMPLACENCE AT THE STEADY GROWTH 
OF THIS HEAVEN-DARKENING DESPOTISM OVER THE 
GRAVE OF LIBERTY? 



264 Modem Christianity and Modern Science. 

Some quotations from the current press and peri- 
odicals may not be out of place, as illustrating some 
of these points. 

Signor Crispi, late prime minister of Italy, in com- 
paring Europe with Spain, at the time of the Spanish- 
American War, said : — 

"Europe resembles Spain from a certain point of 
view. Anarchy is dominant everywhere. To speak 
frankly, there is no Europe. The European concert 
is only a sinister joke. Nothing can be expected 
from the concert of the powers. We are marching 
toward the unknown. Who knows what to-morrow 
has in store for us?" 

Lord Salisbury, in his Guildhall speech of last year, 
speaking of the constant danger of war, said: — 

"We can not be certain that any government will 
not yield its powers to the less educated and less en- 
lightened classes, by whom more and more in many 
countries of the world public affairs are being gov- 
erned." 

In view of these things, it is no surprise to see a, 
strong reaction setting in in favor of imperialism and 
the centralization of authority. 

Lord Strathcona, returning about the same time 
from Europe, is reported as saying, "There is a wave 
of imperialism sweeping irresistibly over Europe." 

The same is of course even more true of the 
United States. Ten years ago who ever dreamed 
that leading American magazines, like the "North 
American Review," would ever print such articles as 
the one found in the December, ICS99, number of that 
journal, entitled "Some Consecrated Fallacies"? 



Evolution and the World Problems. 265' 

The ideas which this writer thus stigmatizes are 
those historic sentences of the Declaration of Inde- 
pendence that speak of the inherent rights of man; 
and of them he has the following to say: — 

"All men are simply not created equal in any pos- 
sible sense of the word. . . . The creation of 
man has been a gradual process of evolution, and they 
have been coming into being in different parts of the 
earth through long generations, zvith differences and 
inequalities, which development has varied and wid- 
ened, and not obliterated" 

So we see that the stronghold, the justification, of 
it all is the doctrine of universal evolution. 

Ten years ago who ever dreamed that such a paper 
as the "Independent" would yet set aside the great 
truth of natural rights as only a "theory," and appear 
to rejoice that "the revolt against it grows apace"? 8 

Dr. Lyman Abbott, the editor of the "Outlook," 
as might be expected of an ardent evolutionist of long 
standing, is leading out in this crusade against men 
having any inherent rights whatever. In a recent 
number of his paper, after declaring that government 
is not founded upon the consent of the governed, but 
upon the inherent right of every man to protect him- 
self, his property, and those dependent upon him, Dr 
Abbott defines government as follows: — 

"What is government? — It is nothing less than the 
control of one man's will by another man's will. . . . 

"The real question as to the basis of government, 
then, is this, When has one man a right by his will 
to control the wills of other men, to overrule them, 

8 "The Independent," October 25, 1900. 



266 Modern Christianity and Modern Science. 

to substitute himself as the director of the action of 
other men, to make his personality dominate an- 
other's personality? And this question brings us to 
the same result we have already reached, — he has 
the right to do this whenever that other is, in the ex- 
ercise of his own will, violating the rights of his fel- 
low-men." 

It will not be expected that I should go into a dis- 
cussion of this monstrous definition of government, 
or show that such a definition would not only an- 
swer for the most outrageous and absolute tyranny 
that was ever exercised upon the earth, but any that 
we can conceive of being exercised. As a recent re- 
viewer has said of it: "Government is not the control 
of men's wills; it is the protection of men's rights. 
It has nothing whatever to do zvith the wills of men; 
it has only to do with the actions of men which in- 
fringe upon the rights of others. . . . Govern- 
ment, much less than being the control of one man's 
will by another man's will, is neither a matter of will 
on one side or the other; it is neither the enforcement 
of will nor the subjection of will. There is no need 
of quoting authority on this point. Search the annals 
of Anglo-Saxon history and jurisprudence from 
King Alfred down, and the overwhelming answer 
you will get is that there can be no rule of will but 
the rule of tyranny." 

These three journals quoted above might well be 
taken as representing almost all of the educated 
American public. But they do more than merely 
reflect public opinion. Perhaps no other three pub- 
lic institutions have such power to mould, to educate, 



Evolution and the World Problems. 267 

the public, and to change its attitude on important 
subjects. But when such teaching as the above is re- 
ceived with scarcely a protest, we may well ask. What 
next? 

The other remedy, the other panacea for the evils 
of our time, is just as logical, though more horrible 
by far. For ages the Roman Catholic Church has 
stood for the regulation of religion by the state — 1 
beg their pardon, for the regulation of the state by 
religion. The Protestant evolutionist — and how few 
are the modern Protestants who are not evolu- 
tionists! — believes most firmly in religious develop- 
ment and the speedy triumph of Christianity over 
all the forms of evil. What more logical to those 
who reject the "supernatural" part of religion than 
to invoke all the powers of the state, which is the 
strongest available power at hand? The power of 
God is out of the question; or, to speak more pre- 
cisely, the power of the state is about the only "man- 
ifestation of the power of God" the rationalist will 
allow of outside of "natural law," at least the only 
one competent for the desired result. Why not unite 
in an organized raid on all unrighteousness, thus 
hastening the glad reign of peace and joy? Would 
it not be for the greatest good to the greatest num- 
ber? Why let the commercial trusts reap all the ben- 
efits growing out of this new system of organized 
and combined effort? For many years now they 
have been talking and reasoning along these lines, 
devoting more attention to the salvation of the state 
than to that of the individual, till the contagion of 
this trust fever has quickened their pulses; and what 



268 Modem Christianity and Modern Science. 

do we see just ahead? — The confederation together of 
all the churches for economy of work and to secure 
the establishment of those things that are held by 
them in common. But again I would ask the stu- 
dent of history, What do these things mean? 

The Roman Catholic Church is, of course, friendly 
to such an idea. She has had an experience in this 
sort of thing before. It " 'minds her o' departed 
joys," which she was almost afraid had "departed 
never to return." But with silent satisfaction she 
now sees that "all those forces of science, which it 
w r as once thought would be fatal to her, are now, in 
a way which constitutes one of the surprises of his- 
tory, so grouping themselves as to afford her a new 
foundation." 9 

And it is the younger men who are leading out 
along these lines. They were educated in an atmos- 
phere of evolution and "Higher Criticism," all tend- 
ing to undermine faith in the Bible, and thus to ban- 
ish it as effectually from heart and every-day life as 
did the ignorance of the Dark Ages. Those days of 
intellectual darkness, when the lamp of life was 
locked up from the common people in the tomb of 
the dead languages, were favorable to the success of 
popery. But it is being demonstrated before our eyes 
that an age of "great intellectual light is equally favor- 
able for its success." 

The practical politician will soon find that he can 
not get along without the help of these religionists; 
and when we add to these the fast-developing possi- 



9 B. F. Da Costa, D. D. 



Evolution and the World Problems. 269 

bilities of spiritism in its myriad modern forms, we 
have a combination which is evidently able (?) to re- 
store peace and prosperity to our poor, distracted 
planet. A religio-political despotism is the logical 
outcome of the evolution theory; its triumph is only 
a question of time; and its strength when established 
can be estimated only by the breadth and strength 
of the teaching which during fifty years, or nearly, 
has been preparing the world for just such a state 
of things, viz., the belief in the struggle for existence 
as the normal and not an abnormal condition of na- 
ture and of society, and the resultant denial of the 
Scriptures as the supreme guide of human conduct. 

The century which has just now sunk beneath the 
west, dawned smiling on the buoyant hopes of man. 
Democracy was looked to as the force which was 
to redeem all things. But its closing hours wit- 
nessed also the passing of its dream. Man has not 
in him anything tending toward self-regeneration. A 
few may be saved; the race can not be. Its disease is 
incurable. It is to-day going the way it has always 
gone.— building the tombs of the martyrs of the past 
and lighting the fagot for the "stubborn" heroes of 
the present. 

But these things do not come as a surprise to an 
omniscient God. Looking down the dark, tear- 
misted vista of the ages, He saw how human ingenu- 
ity would turn into instruments of cruelty and despot- 
ism the marvelous knowledge of His created works, 
and relegate to the museums the vital teachings of 
His Word. To John on lonely Patmos He pictured 
how, in the western world, outside the ten powers of 



270 Modern Christianity and Modern Science. 

Europe, a power would arise that would at first, in its 
broad principles of freedom and toleration, have all 
the appearance of lamb-like innocence and peace. 10 
John saw this rising power of democracy develop and 
become a mighty power in the earth; but then ap- 
peared the native savagery of its character, for, like 
all the organizations of humankind before, "it spake 
as a dragon." 11 He saw this lamb-dragon pander- 
ing to the power of the rejuvenated antichrist., 
whose deadly wound had been healed, and after 
whom all the world was wondering; 12 and, united 
hand in hand, he watched them in their attempt 
to stamp out the last embers of faith in the Cre- 
ator as the sovereign Father of all, and the only 
Being worthy of the worship and obedience of the 
human mind. Bitter and fierce the conflict, the 
powers of all the world uniting to force the few faith- 
ful followers of His Word, "small and great, rich and 
poor, free and bond," to receive at their bidding the 
sign of their power and authority, in opposition to 
the souvenir of the Creator's power, — "and that no 
man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or 
the name of the beast, or the number of his name." 13 
And in that day — nay, in this day — when we are 
in the stress and conflict over the very foundations 
of belief, when evil is once more apparently triumph- 
ant, and Satan's first, last lie, "Ye shall be as gods/' 
is again called truth and wisdom, reader, where do 



10 Rev. 13:11-17. 
"Verse it. 
12 Verses 3, 12. 
r ^ Verse 17. 



Evolution and the World Problems. 271 

you stand? Are you trusting in the Creator of the 
heavens and the earth, who alone has the power to 
re-create you a new creature in Christ Jesus, and who 
is able to preserve amid the utmost stress and trial 
every trusting child of faith? Or will you reject the 
salvation so freely offered as a gift, and join those 
who are seeking in their own way and according to 
their own theories to save themselves and their world, 
and who, in their blindness, think it necessary to get 
rid of the troublesome few who stand in their way? 
"Choose ye this day whom ye will serve, but as 
for me and my house, we will serve the Lord," 



9 



After Death* 



The Word of God alone reveals the great secret. 
A correct understanding of this matter is of the most vital 
importance to humanity. 

Miracles and Delusions 

Is the title of a book recently published which presents in 
an able and lucid manner Bible truths on this subject, 
and discusses the many false theories which are now being 
advocated, based on the supposition that we are able to 
communicate with those who are now sleeping in their 
graves. Here are a few of the chapter headings: — 

DESIRE TO KNOW THE MYSTERIOUS 

THE CRAVING FOR POWER 
MIRACULOUS WORKINGS THAT DECEIVE 

TRYING THE SPIRITS 



The book contains one hundred pages, bound in substantial 
cloth, unique cover design 

Price 50 cents post-paid :: Paper covers, 15 cents 




PACIFIC PRESS PUBLISHING CO. 

Oakland, California 
n W. 20th St., New York, N. Y. 18 W. 5th St, Kansas City, Mo. 



** 



\& 



SEP. 13 1302 



Deacidified using the Bookkeeper process. 
Neutralizing agent: Magnesium Oxide 
Treatment Date: Dec. 2004 

PreservationTechnologies 

A WORLD LEADER IN PAPER PRESERVATION 

1 1 1 Thomson Park Drive 
Cranberry Township, PA 16066 
(724)779-2111 



